This work tackles an intriguing and fundamental open challenge in representation learning: Given a well-trained deep learning model, can it be reprogrammed to enhance its robustness against adversarial or noisy input perturbations without altering its parameters? To explore this, we revisit the core feature transformation mechanism in representation learning and propose a novel non-linear robust pattern matching technique as a robust alternative. Furthermore, we introduce three model reprogramming paradigms to offer flexible control of robustness under different efficiency requirements. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies across diverse learning models ranging from basic linear model and MLPs to shallow and modern deep ConvNets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. This work not only opens a promising and orthogonal direction for improving adversarial defenses in deep learning beyond existing methods but also provides new insights into designing more resilient AI systems with robust statistics. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/chris-hzc/Robustness-Reprogramming.

The training and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involve diverse textual data from multiple sources, which poses challenges due to conflicting gradient directions, hindering optimization and specialization. These challenges can undermine model generalization across tasks, resulting in reduced downstream performance. Recent research suggests that fine-tuning LLMs on carefully selected, task-specific subsets of data can match or even surpass the performance of using the entire dataset. Building on these insights, we propose the Ensembles of Low-Rank Expert Adapters (ELREA) framework to improve the model's capability to handle diverse tasks. ELREA clusters the training instructions based on their gradient directions, representing different areas of expertise and thereby reducing conflicts during optimization. Expert adapters are then trained on these clusters, utilizing the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique to ensure training efficiency and model scalability. During inference, ELREA combines predictions from the most relevant expert adapters based on the input data's gradient similarity to the training clusters, ensuring optimal adapter selection for each task. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline LoRA adapters trained on the full dataset and other ensemble approaches with similar training and inference complexity across a range of domain-specific tasks.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have attracted substantial attention due to their powerful ability in modeling graph-structured data and broad applications across various domains such as social media, biology, health and finance. Despite these successes, GNNs exhibit significant vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks, which poses challenges to their reliable deployment in real scenarios. In this tutorial, we will provide an in-depth exploration of existing adversarial attacks and the state-of-the-art techniques in enhancing the robustness of GNNs. Participants will gain insights into advancing attack and defense methods, along with evaluation and comparison of robust GNN models. Besides a thorough overview on current landscape, we will also cover the summary and discussion on potential future directions, aiming to inspire more researchers to engage and innovate in this field.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have seen significant achievements in semi-supervised node classification. Yet, their efficacy often hinges on access to high-quality labeled node samples, which may not always be available in real-world scenarios. While active learning is commonly employed across various domains to pinpoint and label high-quality samples based on data features, graph data present unique challenges due to their intrinsic structures that render nodes non-i.i.d. Furthermore, biases emerge from the positioning of labeled nodes; for instance, nodes closer to the labeled counterparts often yield better performance. To better leverage graph structure and mitigate structural bias in active learning, we present a unified optimization framework (SCARCE), which is also easily incorporated with node features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method not only improves the GNNs performance but also paves the way for more fair results.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have greatly advanced the semi-supervised node classification task on graphs. The majority of existing GNNs are trained in an end-to-end manner that can be viewed as tackling a bi-level optimization problem. This process is often inefficient in computation and memory usage. In this work, we propose a new optimization framework for semi-supervised learning on graphs from a multi-view learning perspective. The proposed framework can be conveniently solved by the alternating optimization algorithms, resulting in significantly improved efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable or better performance with state-of-the-art baselines while it has significantly better computation and memory efficiency.

Recent works have demonstrated the benefits of capturing long-distance dependency in graphs by deeper graph neural networks (GNNs). But deeper GNNs suffer from the long-lasting scalability challenge due to the neighborhood explosion problem in large-scale graphs. In this work, we propose to capture long-distance dependency in graphs by shallower models instead of deeper models, which leads to a much more efficient model, LazyGNN, for graph representation learning. Moreover, we demonstrate that LazyGNN is compatible with existing scalable approaches (such as sampling methods) for further accelerations through the development of mini-batch LazyGNN. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate its superior prediction performance and scalability on large-scale benchmarks. The implementation of LazyGNN is available at https: //github.com/RXPHD/Lazy_GNN.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for semi-supervised node classification tasks. However, recent studies have revealed various biases in GNNs stemming from both node features and graph topology. In this work, we uncover a new bias - label position bias, which indicates that the node closer to the labeled nodes tends to perform better. We introduce a new metric, the Label Proximity Score, to quantify this bias, and find that it is closely related to performance disparities. To address the label position bias, we propose a novel optimization framework for learning a label position unbiased graph structure, which can be applied to existing GNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method not only outperforms backbone methods but also significantly mitigates the issue of label position bias in GNNs.

Most deep neural networks use simple, fixed activation functions, such as sigmoids or rectified linear units, regardless of domain or network structure. We introduce differential equation units (DEUs), an improvement to modern neural networks, which enables each neuron to learn a particular nonlinear activation function from a family of solutions to an ordinary differential equation. Specifically, each neuron may change its functional form during training based on the behavior of the other parts of the network. We show that using neurons with DEU activation functions results in a more compact network capable of achieving comparable, if not superior, performance when compared to much larger networks.

Previous analysis of binary SVMs has demonstrated a deep connection between robustness to perturbations over uncertainty sets and regularization of the weights. In this paper, we explore the problem of learning robust models for structured prediction problems. We first formulate the problem of learning robust structural SVMs when there are perturbations in the feature space. We consider two different classes of uncertainty sets for the perturbations: ellipsoidal uncertainty sets and polyhedral uncertainty sets. In both cases, we show that the robust optimization problem is equivalent to the non-robust formulation with an additional regularizer. For the ellipsoidal uncertainty set, the additional regularizer is based on the dual norm of the norm that constrains the ellipsoidal uncertainty. For the polyhedral uncertainty set, we show that the robust optimization problem is equivalent to adding a linear regularizer in a transformed weight space related to the linear constraints of the polyhedron. We also show that these constraint sets can be combined and demonstrate a number of interesting special cases. This represents the first theoretical analysis of robust optimization of structural support vector machines. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms the nonrobust structural SVMs on real world data when the test data distributions is drifted from the training data distribution.

In this paper, we present a novel method for robustly performing collective classification in the presence of a malicious adversary that can modify up to a fixed number of binary-valued attributes. Our method is formulated as a convex quadratic program that guarantees optimal weights against a worst-case adversary in polynomial time. In addition to increased robustness against active adversaries, this kind of adversarial regularization can also lead to improved generalization even when no adversary is present. In experiments on real and simulated data, our method consistently outperforms both non-adversarial and non-relational baselines.