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Spotlight
Uncovering the Connections Between Adversarial Transferability and Knowledge Transferability
Kaizhao Liang · Yibo Zhang · Boxin Wang · Zhuolin Yang · Sanmi Koyejo · Bo Li

Thu Jul 22 07:30 PM -- 07:35 PM (PDT) @
in Adversarial Learning 4 »

Knowledge transferability, or transfer learning, has been widely adopted to allow a pre-trained model in the source domain to be effectively adapted to downstream tasks in the target domain. It is thus important to explore and understand the factors affecting knowledge transferability. In this paper, as the first work, we analyze and demonstrate the connections between knowledge transferability and another important phenomenon--adversarial transferability, \emph{i.e.}, adversarial examples generated against one model can be transferred to attack other models. Our theoretical studies show that adversarial transferability indicates knowledge transferability, and vice versa. Moreover, based on the theoretical insights, we propose two practical adversarial transferability metrics to characterize this process, serving as bidirectional indicators between adversarial and knowledge transferability. We conduct extensive experiments for different scenarios on diverse datasets, showing a positive correlation between adversarial transferability and knowledge transferability. Our findings will shed light on future research about effective knowledge transfer learning and adversarial transferability analyses.

Keywords: Adversarial Examples · Algorithms

Author Information

Kaizhao Liang (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)

Class 2020 CS@UIUC, ML engineer@ SambaNova starting this July.

Yibo Zhang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Boxin Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Zhuolin Yang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Sanmi Koyejo (Illinois / Google)
Sanmi Koyejo

Sanmi (Oluwasanmi) Koyejo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Koyejo was previously an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Koyejo's research interests are in developing the principles and practice of trustworthy machine learning, focusing on applications to neuroscience and healthcare. Koyejo completed a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Joydeep Ghosh, and postdoctoral research at Stanford University with Russell A. Poldrack and Pradeep Ravikumar. Koyejo has been the recipient of several awards, including a best paper award from the conference on uncertainty in artificial intelligence, a Skip Ellis Early Career Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Terman faculty fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, a Kavli Fellowship, an IJCAI early career spotlight, and a trainee award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. Koyejo spends time at Google as a part of the Brain team, serves on the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation Board, the Association for Health Learning and Inference Board, and as president of the Black in AI organization.

Bo Li (UIUC)
Bo Li

Dr. Bo Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is the recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, AI’s 10 to Watch, NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Intel Rising Star award, Symantec Research Labs Fellowship, Rising Star Award, Research Awards from Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Intel, IBM, and eBay, and best paper awards at several top machine learning and security conferences. Her research focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of trustworthy machine learning, which is at the intersection of machine learning, security, privacy, and game theory. She has designed several scalable frameworks for trustworthy machine learning and privacy-preserving data publishing. Her work has been featured by major publications and media outlets such as Nature, Wired, Fortune, and New York Times.

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