7,690 research outputs found
HopSkipJumpAttack: A Query-Efficient Decision-Based Attack
The goal of a decision-based adversarial attack on a trained model is to
generate adversarial examples based solely on observing output labels returned
by the targeted model. We develop HopSkipJumpAttack, a family of algorithms
based on a novel estimate of the gradient direction using binary information at
the decision boundary. The proposed family includes both untargeted and
targeted attacks optimized for and similarity metrics
respectively. Theoretical analysis is provided for the proposed algorithms and
the gradient direction estimate. Experiments show HopSkipJumpAttack requires
significantly fewer model queries than Boundary Attack. It also achieves
competitive performance in attacking several widely-used defense mechanisms.
(HopSkipJumpAttack was named Boundary Attack++ in a previous version of the
preprint.
ReSQueing Parallel and Private Stochastic Convex Optimization
We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a
Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function
convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent
advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop
algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and
private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in
, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic
factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error
with gradient
oracle query depth and gradient queries in total, assuming access to a
bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For , our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of
[BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient
descent. Given samples of Lipschitz loss functions, prior works [BFTT19,
BFGT20, AFKT21, KLL21] established that if , -differential
privacy is attained at no asymptotic cost to the SCO utility. However, these
prior works all required a superlinear number of gradient queries. We close
this gap for sufficiently large , by
using ReSQue to design an algorithm with near-linear gradient query complexity
in this regime
Learning to Efficiently Rank
Web search engines allow users to find information on almost any topic imaginable. To be successful, a search engine must return relevant information to the user in a short amount of time. However, efficiency (speed) and effectiveness (relevance) are competing forces that often counteract each other. It is often the case that methods developed for improving effectiveness incur moderate-to-large computational costs, thus sustained effectiveness gains typically have to be counter-balanced by buying more/faster hardware, implementing caching strategies if possible, or spending additional effort in low-level optimizations.Β
This thesis describes the "Learning to Efficiently Rank" framework for building highly effective ranking models for Web-scale data, without sacrificing run-time efficiency for returning results. It introduces new classes of ranking models that have the capability of being simultaneously fast and effective, and discusses the issue of how to optimize the models for speed and effectiveness. More specifically, a series of concrete instantiations of the general "Learning to Efficiently Rank" framework are illustrated in detail. First, given a desired tradeoff between effectiveness/efficiency, efficient linear models, which have a mechanism to directly optimize the tradeoff metric and achieve an optimal balance between effectiveness/efficiency, are introduced. Second, temporally constrained models for returning the most effective ranked results possible under a time constraint are described. Third, a cascade ranking model for efficient top-K retrieval over Web-scale documents is proposed, where the ranking effectiveness and efficiency are simultaneously optimized. Finally, a constrained cascade for returning results within time constraints by simultaneously reducing document set size and unnecessary features is discussed in detail
Selective Query Processing: a Risk-Sensitive Selection of System Configurations
In information retrieval systems, search parameters are optimized to ensure
high effectiveness based on a set of past searches and these optimized
parameters are then used as the system configuration for all subsequent
queries. A better approach, however, would be to adapt the parameters to fit
the query at hand. Selective query expansion is one such an approach, in which
the system decides automatically whether or not to expand the query, resulting
in two possible system configurations. This approach was extended recently to
include many other parameters, leading to many possible system configurations
where the system automatically selects the best configuration on a per-query
basis. To determine the ideal configurations to use on a per-query basis in
real-world systems we developed a method in which a restricted number of
possible configurations is pre-selected and then used in a meta-search engine
that decides the best search configuration on a per query basis. We define a
risk-sensitive approach for configuration pre-selection that considers the
risk-reward trade-off between the number of configurations kept, and system
effectiveness. For final configuration selection, the decision is based on
query feature similarities. We find that a relatively small number of
configurations (20) selected by our risk-sensitive model is sufficient to
increase effectiveness by about 15% according(P@10, nDCG@10) when compared to
traditional grid search using a single configuration and by about 20% when
compared to learning to rank documents. Our risk-sensitive approach works for
both diversity- and ad hoc-oriented searches. Moreover, the similarity-based
selection method outperforms the more sophisticated approaches. Thus, we
demonstrate the feasibility of developing per-query information retrieval
systems, which will guide future research in this direction.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables; submitted to TOIS ACM journa
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