Contrastive learning (CL) pre-trains general-purpose encoders using an unlabeled pre-training dataset, which consists of images or image-text pairs. CL is vulnerable to data poisoning based backdoor attacks (DPBAs), in which an attacker injects poisoned inputs into the pre-training dataset so the encoder is backdoored. However, existing DPBAs achieve limited effectiveness. In this work, we take the first step to analyze the limitations of existing backdoor attacks and propose new DPBAs called CorruptEncoder to CL. CorruptEncoder introduces a new attack strategy to create poisoned inputs and uses a theory-guided method to maximize attack effectiveness. Our experiments show that CorruptEncoder substantially outperforms existing DPBAs. In particular, CorruptEncoder is the first DPBA that achieves more than 90% attack success rates with only a few (3) reference images and a small poisoning ratio 0.5%. Moreover, we also propose a defense, called localized cropping, to defend against DPBAs. Our results show that our defense can reduce the effectiveness of DPBAs, but it sacrifices the utility of the encoder, highlighting the need for new defenses.
Point cloud classification is an essential component in many security-critical applications such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. However, point cloud classifiers are vulnerable to adversarially perturbed point clouds. Existing certified defenses against adversarial point clouds suffer from a key limitation: their certified robustness guarantees are probabilistic, i.e., they produce an incorrect certified robustness guarantee with some probability. In this work, we propose a general framework, namely PointCert, that can transform an arbitrary point cloud classifier to be certifiably robust against adversarial point clouds with deterministic guarantees. PointCert certifiably predicts the same label for a point cloud when the number of arbitrarily added, deleted, and/or modified points is less than a threshold. Moreover, we propose multiple methods to optimize the certified robustness guarantees of PointCert in three application scenarios. We systematically evaluate PointCert on ModelNet and ScanObjectNN benchmark datasets. Our results show that PointCert substantially outperforms state-of-the-art certified defenses even though their robustness guarantees are probabilistic.
Poisoning attacks compromise the training phase of federated learning (FL) such that the learned global model misclassifies attacker-chosen inputs called target inputs. Existing defenses mainly focus on protecting the training phase of FL such that the learnt global model is poison free. However, these defenses often achieve limited effectiveness when the clients' local training data is highly non-iid or the number of malicious clients is large, as confirmed in our experiments. In this work, we propose FLForensics, the first poison-forensics method for FL. FLForensics complements existing training-phase defenses. In particular, when training-phase defenses fail and a poisoned global model is deployed, FLForensics aims to trace back the malicious clients that performed the poisoning attack after a misclassified target input is identified. We theoretically show that FLForensics can accurately distinguish between benign and malicious clients under a formal definition of poisoning attack. Moreover, we empirically show the effectiveness of FLForensics at tracing back both existing and adaptive poisoning attacks on five benchmark datasets.
The increasing realism of synthetic speech, driven by advancements in text-to-speech models, raises ethical concerns regarding impersonation and disinformation. Audio watermarking offers a promising solution via embedding human-imperceptible watermarks into AI-generated audios. However, the robustness of audio watermarking against common/adversarial perturbations remains understudied. We present AudioMarkBench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the robustness of audio watermarking against watermark removal and watermark forgery. AudioMarkBench includes a new dataset created from Common-Voice across languages, biological sexes, and ages, 3 state-of-the-art watermarking methods, and 15 types of perturbations. We benchmark the robustness of these methods against the perturbations in no-box, black-box, and white-box settings. Our findings highlight the vulnerabilities of current watermarking techniques and emphasize the need for more robust and fair audio watermarking solutions. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/moyangkuo/AudioMarkBench.
Henry W. Sprueill, Carl Edwards, Khushbu Agarwal et al.
The discovery of new catalysts is essential for the design of new and more efficient chemical processes in order to transition to a sustainable future. We introduce an AI-guided computational screening framework unifying linguistic reasoning with quantum-chemistry based feedback from 3D atomistic representations. Our approach formulates catalyst discovery as an uncertain environment where an agent actively searches for highly effective catalysts via the iterative combination of large language model (LLM)-derived hypotheses and atomistic graph neural network (GNN)-derived feedback. Identified catalysts in intermediate search steps undergo structural evaluation based on spatial orientation, reaction pathways, and stability. Scoring functions based on adsorption energies and reaction energy barriers steer the exploration in the LLM's knowledge space toward energetically favorable, high-efficiency catalysts. We introduce planning methods that automatically guide the exploration without human input, providing competitive performance against expert-enumerated chemical descriptor-based implementations. By integrating language-guided reasoning with computational chemistry feedback, our work pioneers AI-accelerated, trustworthy catalyst discovery.
3D point cloud classification has many safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robotic grasping. However, several studies showed that it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In particular, an attacker can make a classifier predict an incorrect label for a 3D point cloud via carefully modifying, adding, and/or deleting a small number of its points. Randomized smoothing is state-of-the-art technique to build certifiably robust 2D image classifiers. However, when applied to 3D point cloud classification, randomized smoothing can only certify robustness against adversarially modified points. In this work, we propose PointGuard, the first defense that has provable robustness guarantees against adversarially modified, added, and/or deleted points. Specifically, given a 3D point cloud and an arbitrary point cloud classifier, our PointGuard first creates multiple subsampled point clouds, each of which contains a random subset of the points in the original point cloud; then our PointGuard predicts the label of the original point cloud as the majority vote among the labels of the subsampled point clouds predicted by the point cloud classifier. Our first major theoretical contribution is that we show PointGuard provably predicts the same label for a 3D point cloud when the number of adversarially modified, added, and/or deleted points is bounded. Our second major theoretical contribution is that we prove the tightness of our derived bound when no assumptions on the point cloud classifier are made. Moreover, we design an efficient algorithm to compute our certified robustness guarantees. We also empirically evaluate PointGuard on ModelNet40 and ScanNet benchmark datasets.
Top-k predictions are used in many real-world applications such as machine learning as a service, recommender systems, and web searches. $\ell_0$-norm adversarial perturbation characterizes an attack that arbitrarily modifies some features of an input such that a classifier makes an incorrect prediction for the perturbed input. $\ell_0$-norm adversarial perturbation is easy to interpret and can be implemented in the physical world. Therefore, certifying robustness of top-$k$ predictions against $\ell_0$-norm adversarial perturbation is important. However, existing studies either focused on certifying $\ell_0$-norm robustness of top-$1$ predictions or $\ell_2$-norm robustness of top-$k$ predictions. In this work, we aim to bridge the gap. Our approach is based on randomized smoothing, which builds a provably robust classifier from an arbitrary classifier via randomizing an input. Our major theoretical contribution is an almost tight $\ell_0$-norm certified robustness guarantee for top-$k$ predictions. We empirically evaluate our method on CIFAR10 and ImageNet. For instance, our method can build a classifier that achieves a certified top-3 accuracy of 69.2\% on ImageNet when an attacker can arbitrarily perturb 5 pixels of a testing image.
Differentially private machine learning trains models while protecting privacy of the sensitive training data. The key to obtain differentially private models is to introduce noise/randomness to the training process. In particular, existing differentially private machine learning methods add noise to the training data, the gradients, the loss function, and/or the model itself. Bagging, a popular ensemble learning framework, randomly creates some subsamples of the training data, trains a base model for each subsample using a base learner, and takes majority vote among the base models when making predictions. Bagging has intrinsic randomness in the training process as it randomly creates subsamples. Our major theoretical results show that such intrinsic randomness already makes Bagging differentially private without the needs of additional noise. In particular, we prove that, for any base learner, Bagging with and without replacement respectively achieves $\left(N\cdot k \cdot \ln{\frac{n+1}{n}},1- (\frac{n-1}{n})^{N\cdot k}\right)$-differential privacy and $\left(\ln{\frac{n+1}{n+1-N\cdot k}}, \frac{N\cdot k}{n} \right)$-differential privacy, where $n$ is the training data size, $k$ is the subsample size, and $N$ is the number of base models. Moreover, we prove that if no assumptions about the base learner are made, our derived privacy guarantees are tight. We empirically evaluate Bagging on MNIST and CIFAR10. Our experimental results demonstrate that Bagging achieves significantly higher accuracies than state-of-the-art differentially private machine learning methods with the same privacy budgets.