Parsimonious Black-Box Adversarial Attacks via Efficient Combinatorial Optimization

Solving for adversarial examples with projected gradient descent has been demonstrated to be highly effective in fooling the neural network based classifiers. However, in the black-box setting, the attacker is limited only to the query access to the network and solving for a successful adversarial example becomes much more difficult. To this end, recent methods aim at estimating the true gradient signal based on the input queries but at the cost of excessive queries. We propose an efficient discrete surrogate to the optimization problem which does not require estimating the gradient and consequently becomes free of the first order update hyperparameters to tune. Our experiments on Cifar-10 and ImageNet show the state of the art black-box attack performance with significant reduction in the required queries compared to a number of recently proposed methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/parsimonious-blackbox-attack.Comment: Accepted and to appear at ICML 201

Enter exitrons

Staiger D, Simpson GG. Enter exitrons. Genome Biology. 2015;16(1): 136.Exitrons are exon-like introns located within protein-coding exons. Removal or retention of exitrons through alternative splicing increases proteome complexity and thus adds to phenotypic diversity

Writing in a Country at War

What are a writer\u27s duties, previleges and obligations when his or her country is at war? The author discusses his belief in meaningful audience to engage with in time of war and occupation

PHENOMENOLOGY, DECONSTRUCTION, AND CRITIQUE: A DERRIDEAN PERSPECTIVE

Critical phenomenology is gaining currency as a progressive philosophy of emancipation, but there is no consensus on what its “criticality” entails. From a Derridean perspective, critique can be said to involve radical self-interrogation; a philosophy that questions its own conditions of possibility or grounds is one that opens itself to its auto-deconstruction. Deconstruction produces undecidability, however, which means that the philosophy in question can no longer account for its political claims or its normative force. This is the predicament in which critical phenomenology, like any other critical theory, will find itself when it takes its critical injunction to heart

Artificially Intelligent Copyright: Rethinking Copyright Boundaries

My dissertation explores the legal boundaries of copyright law in the wake of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In building the theoretical foundations for my dissertation, I go through several key phases. First, I highlight important historical events and milestones in AI. I further develop the philosophical debate on AI legal personhood and deliberate whether we are approaching a singularity the next stage of AI evolution. I also explore the concept of AI as it matured through the years. In the second part, I theorize how AI can be regarded as an author under IP normative standards. Part of accepting the argument that AI deserve copyright is a willingness to change the perception that only human creations are worthy of copyright protection. I also seek an answer to two sub-questions the who and the what. The who considers the normative standards of authorship in the ongoing struggle between an authors right and the public domain. The what raise the originality debate and discusses the standard of creation. In the third part, I outline the many candidates for AI authorship the programmer, the user, the AI and an alternative legal framework for AIs ownership like the public domain or author-in-law. Finally, I discuss the outcomes of each model and provide my conclusions

Tournament Auctions

We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which N bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder N+1. When the first N bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in the second stage, the analysis yields some unexpected results. The first N bidders consistently bid above their values in equilibrium. When bidder N+1 is sufficiently stronger than the first N, overbidding leads to an increase in expected revenue in comparison to the standard second-price auction when $N$ is large

Tournament Auctions

We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which $N$ bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder $N+1$. When the first $N$ bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in the second stage, the analysis yields some unexpected results. The first $N$ bidders consistently bid above their values in equilibrium. When bidder $N+1$ is sufficiently stronger than the first $N$, overbidding leads to an increase in expected revenue in comparison to the standard second-price auction when $N$ is large.Comment: 19 page

Reinforcement Learning with Non-Markovian Rewards

The standard RL world model is that of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A basic premise of MDPs is that the rewards depend on the last state and action only. Yet, many real-world rewards are non-Markovian. For example, a reward for bringing coffee only if requested earlier and not yet served, is non-Markovian if the state only records current requests and deliveries. Past work considered the problem of modeling and solving MDPs with non-Markovian rewards (NMR), but we know of no principled approaches for RL with NMR. Here, we address the problem of policy learning from experience with such rewards. We describe and evaluate empirically four combinations of the classical RL algorithm Q-learning and R-max with automata learning algorithms to obtain new RL algorithms for domains with NMR. We also prove that some of these variants converge to an optimal policy in the limit.Comment: To Appear in AAAI 202

World Sephardic Federation and its Congress in Jerusalem in 1954

Na Svetskoj sefardskoj federaciji i njenom kongresu u Izraelu (Jerusalimu), razmatrani su događaji koji su doveli do stvaranja Federacije i odredili njene ciljeve. Sefardsko Jevrejstvo, čije je poreklo u Španiji, uvek je pokazivalo naročitu privrženost prema toj zemlji, iz koje je tako surovo bilo proterano 1492. godine. Neki istoričari tvrde da je u Španiji bilo Jevreja još za vlade kralja Solomona u Izraelu. Nema sumnje, međutim, da su posle osvajanja izraelske zemlje od strane Rimljana mnogi zarobljenici bili odvedeni u Španiju. Tamo su postavili temelje napredne jevrejske zajednice, zajednice koja je stvorila jednu od najslavnijih i najznačajnijih epoha jevrejskog života u Dijaspori. Jedna od najvažnijih karakteristika duhovnog, kultumog i književnog napora jevrejskih zajednica u Španiji bilo je pomirenje učenja Judaizma i zapadne kulture i misli.At the World Sephardic Federation and its Congress in Israel (Jerusalem), the events that led to the establishment of the Federation were discussed and its goals were set. Sephardic Jew, which originated in Spain, has always shown a particular attachment to that country, from which it was so cruelly expelled in 1492. Some historians claim that there were Jews in Spain before King Solomon's government in Israel. There is no doubt, however, that after the conquest of the Israeli country by the Romans, many captives were taken to Spain. There, they laid the foundations of a thriving Jewish community, a community that created one of the most celebrated and significant epochs of Jewish life in the Diaspora. One of the most important features of the spiritual, cultural and literary efforts of the Jewish communities in Spain was the reconciliation of the teachings of Judaism and Western culture and thought