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Sven Gowal

25 accepted papers

2025

On the Difficulty of Constructing a Robust and Publicly-Detectable Watermark

AISTATS 2025poster

This work investigates the theoretical boundaries of creating publicly-detectable schemes to enable the provenance of watermarked imagery. Metadata-based approaches like C2PA provide unforgeability and public-detectability. ML techniques offer robust retrieval and watermarking. However, no existing…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Evaluating Model Bias Requires Characterizing its Mistakes

ICML 2024poster

The ability to properly benchmark model performance in the face of spurious correlations is important to both build better predictors and increase confidence that models are operating as intended. We demonstrate that characterizing (as opposed to simply quantifying) model mistakes across subgroups i…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Benchmarking Robustness to Adversarial Image Obfuscations

NeurIPS 2023poster

Automated content filtering and moderation is an important tool that allows online platforms to build striving user communities that facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Unfortunately, resourceful actors try to bypass automated filters in a bid to post content that violate platform policies and…

2023

Seasoning Model Soups for Robustness to Adversarial and Natural Distribution Shifts

CVPR 2023poster

Adversarial training is widely used to make classifiers robust to a specific threat or adversary, such as l_p-norm bounded perturbations of a given p-norm. However, existing methods for training classifiers robust to multiple threats require knowledge of all attacks during training and remain vulner…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Fine-Grained Analysis on Distribution Shift

ICLR 2022oral

Robustness to distribution shifts is critical for deploying machine learning models in the real world. Despite this necessity, there has been little work in defining the underlying mechanisms that cause these shifts and evaluating the robustness of algorithms across multiple, different distribution…

2022

Defending Against Image Corruptions Through Adversarial Augmentations

ICLR 2022poster

Modern neural networks excel at image classification, yet they remain vulnerable to common image corruptions such as blur, speckle noise or fog. Recent methods that focus on this problem, such as AugMix and DeepAugment, introduce defenses that operate in expectation over a distribution of image corr…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2022

Evaluating the Adversarial Robustness of Adaptive Test-time Defenses

ICML 2022spotlight

Adaptive defenses, which optimize at test time, promise to improve adversarial robustness. We categorize such adaptive test-time defenses, explain their potential benefits and drawbacks, and evaluate a representative variety of the latest adaptive defenses for image classification. Unfortunately, no…

2022

Hindering Adversarial Attacks with Implicit Neural Representations

ICML 2022spotlight

We introduce the Lossy Implicit Network Activation Coding (LINAC) defence, an input transformation which successfully hinders several common adversarial attacks on CIFAR-10 classifiers for perturbations up to 8/255 in Linf norm and 0.5 in L2 norm. Implicit neural representations are used to approxim…

2021

Data Augmentation Can Improve Robustness

NeurIPS 2021poster

Adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting, a phenomenon where the robust test accuracy starts to decrease during training. In this paper, we focus on reducing robust overfitting by using common data augmentation schemes. We demonstrate that, contrary to previous findings, when combined wi…

2021

Improving Robustness using Generated Data

NeurIPS 2021poster

Recent work argues that robust training requires substantially larger datasets than those required for standard classification. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, this translates into a sizable robust-accuracy gap between models trained solely on data from the original training set and those trained with ad…

Cited by 353SourcePDFScholar
2021

Make Sure You're Unsure: A Framework for Verifying Probabilistic Specifications

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Most real world applications require dealing with stochasticity like sensor noise or predictive uncertainty, where formal specifications of desired behavior are inherently probabilistic. Despite the promise of formal verification in ensuring the reliability of neural networks, progress in the direc…

2021

Self-supervised Adversarial Robustness for the Low-label, High-data Regime

ICLR 2021poster

Recent work discovered that training models to be invariant to adversarial perturbations requires substantially larger datasets than those required for standard classification. Perhaps more surprisingly, these larger datasets can be "mostly" unlabeled. Pseudo-labeling, a technique simultaneously pio…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2020

A FRAMEWORK FOR ROBUSTNESS CERTIFICATION OF SMOOTHED CLASSIFIERS USING F-DIVERGENCES

ICLR 2020poster

Formal verification techniques that compute provable guarantees on properties of machine learning models, like robustness to norm-bounded adversarial perturbations, have yielded impressive results. Although most techniques developed so far require knowledge of the architecture of the machine learnin…

Cited by 64SourceScholar
2020

Achieving Robustness in the Wild via Adversarial Mixing With Disentangled Representations

CVPR 2020poster

Recent research has made the surprising finding that state-of-the-art deep learning models sometimes fail to generalize to small variations of the input. Adversarial training has been shown to be an effective approach to overcome this problem. However, its application has been limited to enforcing i…

Cited by 67PDFcodeScholar
2020

The Autoencoding Variational Autoencoder

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Does a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) consistently encode typical samples generated from its decoder? This paper shows that the perhaps surprising answer to this question is `No'; a (nominally trained) VAE does not necessarily amortize inference for typical samples that it is capable of generating. W…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Towards Robust Image Classification Using Sequential Attention Models

CVPR 2020poster

In this paper we propose to augment a modern neural-network architecture with an attention model inspired by human perception. Specifically, we adversarially train and analyze a neural model incorporating a human inspired, visual attention component that is guided by a recurrent top-down sequential…

Cited by 88PDFScholar
2020

Towards Stable and Efficient Training of Verifiably Robust Neural Networks

ICLR 2020poster

Training neural networks with verifiable robustness guarantees is challenging. Several existing approaches utilize linear relaxation based neural network output bounds under perturbation, but they can slow down training by a factor of hundreds depending on the underlying network architectures. Meanw…

Cited by 396SourceScholar
2020

Towards Verified Robustness under Text Deletion Interventions

ICLR 2020poster

Neural networks are widely used in Natural Language Processing, yet despite their empirical successes, their behaviour is brittle: they are both over-sensitive to small input changes, and under-sensitive to deletions of large fractions of input text. This paper aims to tackle under-sensitivity in th…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2019

Adversarial Robustness through Local Linearization

NeurIPS 2019poster

Adversarial training is an effective methodology for training deep neural networks that are robust against adversarial, norm-bounded perturbations. However, the computational cost of adversarial training grows prohibitively as the size of the model and number of input dimensions increase. Further, t…

Cited by 367SourcePDFScholar
2019

Beyond Greedy Ranking: Slate Optimization via List-CVAE

ICLR 2019poster

The conventional approach to solving the recommendation problem greedily ranks individual document candidates by prediction scores. However, this method fails to optimize the slate as a whole, and hence, often struggles to capture biases caused by the page layout and document interdepedencies. The s…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2019

Efficient Neural Network Verification with Exactness Characterization

UAI 2019poster

Remarkable progress has been made on verification of neural networks, i.e., showing that neural networks are provably consistent with specifications encoding properties like adversarial robustness. Recent methods developed for scalable neural network verification are based on computing an upper bou…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2019

Learning from Delayed Outcomes via Proxies with Applications to Recommender Systems

ICML 2019oral

Predicting delayed outcomes is an important problem in recommender systems (e.g., if customers will finish reading an ebook). We formalize the problem as an adversarial, delayed online learning problem and consider how a proxy for the delayed outcome (e.g., if customers read a third of the book in 2…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2019

Scalable Verified Training for Provably Robust Image Classification

ICCV 2019poster

Recent work has shown that it is possible to train deep neural networks that are provably robust to norm-bounded adversarial perturbations. Most of these methods are based on minimizing an upper bound on the worst-case loss over all possible adversarial perturbations. While these techniques show pro…

Cited by 214PDFScholar
2019

Verification of Non-Linear Specifications for Neural Networks

ICLR 2019poster

Prior work on neural network verification has focused on specifications that are linear functions of the output of the network, e.g., invariance of the classifier output under adversarial perturbations of the input. In this paper, we extend verification algorithms to be able to certify richer proper…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar