Search for: All records

Recent advances in unsupervised learning have shown that unsupervised pre-training, followed by fine-tuning, can improve model generalization. However, a rigorous understanding of how the representation function learned on an unlabeled dataset affects the generalization of the fine-tuned model is lacking. Existing theoretical research does not adequately account for the heterogeneity of the distribution and tasks in pre-training and fine-tuning stage. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel theoretical framework that illuminates the critical factor influencing the transferability of knowledge acquired during unsupervised pre-training to the subsequent fine-tuning phase, ultimately affecting the generalization capabilities of the fine-tuned model on downstream tasks. We apply our theoretical framework to analyze generalization bound of two distinct scenarios: Context Encoder pre-training with deep neural networks and Masked Autoencoder pre-training with deep transformers, followed by fine-tuning on a binary classification task. Finally, inspired by our findings, we propose a novel regularization method during pre-training to further enhances the generalization of fine-tuned model. Overall, our results contribute to a better understanding of unsupervised pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, and can shed light on the design of more effective pre-training algorithms. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to numerous domains, significantly advancing applications in data management, mining, and analysis. Their profound capabilities in processing and interpreting complex language data, however, bring to light pressing concerns regarding data privacy, especially the risk of unintentional training data leakage. Despite the critical nature of this issue, there has been no existing literature to offer a comprehensive assessment of data privacy risks in LLMs. Addressing this gap, our paper introduces LLM-PBE, a toolkit crafted specifically for the systematic evaluation of data privacy risks in LLMs. LLM-PBE is designed to analyze privacy across the entire lifecycle of LLMs, incorporating diverse attack and defense strategies, and handling various data types and metrics. Through detailed experimentation with multiple LLMs, LLM-PBE facilitates an in-depth exploration of data privacy concerns, shedding light on influential factors such as model size, data characteristics, and evolving temporal dimensions. This study not only enriches the understanding of privacy issues in LLMs but also serves as a vital resource for future research in the field. Aimed at enhancing the breadth of knowledge in this area, the findings, resources, and our full technical report are made available at https://llm-pbe.github.io/, providing an open platform for academic and practical advancements in LLM privacy assessment.

 

Federated learning (FL) emerges as a popular distributed learning schema that learns a model from a set of participating users without sharing raw data. One major challenge of FL comes with heterogeneous users, who may have distributionally different (or non-iid) data and varying computation resources. As federated users would use the model for prediction, they often demand the trained model to be robust against malicious attackers at test time. Whereas adversarial training (AT) provides a sound solution for centralized learning, extending its usage for federated users has imposed significant challenges, as many users may have very limited training data and tight computational budgets, to afford the data-hungry and costly AT. In this paper, we study a novel FL strategy: propagating adversarial robustness from rich-resource users that can afford AT, to those with poor resources that cannot afford it, during federated learning. We show that existing FL techniques cannot be effectively integrated with the strategy to propagate robustness among non-iid users and propose an efficient propagation approach by the proper use of batch-normalization. We demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments. Especially, the proposed method is shown to grant federated models remarkable robustness even when only a small portion of users afford AT during learning. Source code can be accessed at https://github.com/illidanlab/FedRBN. 

Data-free knowledge distillation (KD) helps transfer knowledge from a pre-trained model (known as the teacher model) to a smaller model (known as the student model) without access to the original training data used for training the teacher model. However, the security of the synthetic or out-of-distribution (OOD) data required in data-free KD is largely unknown and under-explored. In this work, we make the first effort to uncover the security risk of data-free KD w.r.t. untrusted pre-trained models. We then propose Anti-Backdoor Data-Free KD (ABD), the first plug-in defensive method for data-free KD methods to mitigate the chance of potential backdoors being transferred. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed ABD in diminishing transferred backdoor knowledge while maintaining compatible downstream performances as the vanilla KD. We envision this work as a milestone for alarming and mitigating the potential backdoors in data-free KD. Codes are released at https://github.com/illidanlab/ABD . 

Deep neural networks have witnessed huge successes in many challenging prediction tasks and yet they often suffer from out-of-distribution (OoD) samples, misclassifying them with high confidence. Recent advances show promising OoD detection performance for centralized training, and however, OoD detection in federated learning (FL) is largely overlooked, even though many security sensitive applications such as autonomous driving and voice recognition authorization are commonly trained using FL for data privacy concerns. The main challenge that prevents previous state-of-the-art OoD detection methods from being incorporated to FL is that they require large amount of real OoD samples. However, in real-world scenarios, such large-scale OoD training data can be costly or even infeasible to obtain, especially for resource-limited local devices. On the other hand, a notorious challenge in FL is data heterogeneity where each client collects non-identically and independently distributed (non-iid) data. We propose to take advantage of such heterogeneity and turn the curse into a blessing that facilitates OoD detection in FL. The key is that for each client, non-iid data from other clients (unseen external classes) can serve as an alternative to real OoD samples. Specifically, we propose a novel Federated Out-of-Distribution Synthesizer (FOSTER), which learns a class-conditional generator to synthesize virtual external-class OoD samples, and maintains data confidentiality and communication efficiency required by FL. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 2.49%, 2.88%, 1.42% AUROC, and 0.01%, 0.89%, 1.74% ID accuracy, on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and STL10, respectively.