Adversarial Attacks on Tables with Entity Swap

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied in the context of table representation learning. The recently proposed tabular language models have reported state-of-the-art results across various tasks for table interpretation. However, a closer look into the datasets commonly used for evaluation reveals an entity leakage from the train set into the test set. Motivated by this observation, we explore adversarial attacks that represent a more realistic inference setup. Adversarial attacks on text have been shown to greatly affect the performance of LLMs, but currently, there are no attacks targeting tabular language models. In this paper, we propose an evasive entity-swap attack for the column type annotation (CTA) task. Our CTA attack is the first black-box attack on tables, where we employ a similarity-based sampling strategy to generate adversarial examples. The experimental results show that the proposed attack generates up to a 70% drop in performance.Comment: Accepted at TaDA workshop at VLDB 202

Adaptive Adversarial Training Does Not Increase Recourse Costs

Recent work has connected adversarial attack methods and algorithmic recourse methods: both seek minimal changes to an input instance which alter a model's classification decision. It has been shown that traditional adversarial training, which seeks to minimize a classifier's susceptibility to malicious perturbations, increases the cost of generated recourse; with larger adversarial training radii correlating with higher recourse costs. From the perspective of algorithmic recourse, however, the appropriate adversarial training radius has always been unknown. Another recent line of work has motivated adversarial training with adaptive training radii to address the issue of instance-wise variable adversarial vulnerability, showing success in domains with unknown attack radii. This work studies the effects of adaptive adversarial training on algorithmic recourse costs. We establish that the improvements in model robustness induced by adaptive adversarial training show little effect on algorithmic recourse costs, providing a potential avenue for affordable robustness in domains where recoursability is critical

Discretization-based ensemble model for robust learning in IoT

IoT device identification is the process of recognizing and verifying connected IoT devices to the network. This is an essential process for ensuring that only authorized devices can access the network, and it is necessary for network management and maintenance. In recent years, machine learning models have been used widely for automating the process of identifying devices in the network. However, these models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can compromise their accuracy and effectiveness. To better secure device identification models, discretization techniques enable reduction in the sensitivity of machine learning models to adversarial attacks contributing to the stability and reliability of the model. On the other hand, Ensemble methods combine multiple heterogeneous models to reduce the impact of remaining noise or errors in the model. Therefore, in this paper, we integrate discretization techniques and ensemble methods and examine it on model robustness against adversarial attacks. In other words, we propose a discretization-based ensemble stacking technique to improve the security of our ML models. We evaluate the performance of different ML-based IoT device identification models against white box and black box attacks using a real-world dataset comprised of network traffic from 28 IoT devices. We demonstrate that the proposed method enables robustness to the models for IoT device identification.Comment: 15 page

On the Robustness of Explanations of Deep Neural Network Models: A Survey

Explainability has been widely stated as a cornerstone of the responsible and trustworthy use of machine learning models. With the ubiquitous use of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models expanding to risk-sensitive and safety-critical domains, many methods have been proposed to explain the decisions of these models. Recent years have also seen concerted efforts that have shown how such explanations can be distorted (attacked) by minor input perturbations. While there have been many surveys that review explainability methods themselves, there has been no effort hitherto to assimilate the different methods and metrics proposed to study the robustness of explanations of DNN models. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of methods that study, understand, attack, and defend explanations of DNN models. We also present a detailed review of different metrics used to evaluate explanation methods, as well as describe attributional attack and defense methods. We conclude with lessons and take-aways for the community towards ensuring robust explanations of DNN model predictions.Comment: Under Review ACM Computing Surveys "Special Issue on Trustworthy AI

The Intriguing Relation Between Counterfactual Explanations and Adversarial Examples

The same method that creates adversarial examples (AEs) to fool image-classifiers can be used to generate counterfactual explanations (CEs) that explain algorithmic decisions. This observation has led researchers to consider CEs as AEs by another name. We argue that the relationship to the true label and the tolerance with respect to proximity are two properties that formally distinguish CEs and AEs. Based on these arguments, we introduce CEs, AEs, and related concepts mathematically in a common framework. Furthermore, we show connections between current methods for generating CEs and AEs, and estimate that the fields will merge more and more as the number of common use-cases grows