edwardraffml.bsky.social

edwardraffml.bsky.social

@edwardraffml.bsky.social

Sr. Director @CrowdStrike. Visiting Prof @UMBC. Interested in all things ML

338 followers108 following315 posts

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This results in real-world speedups; there are two slightly slower cases because the models just didn't cycle. But those are on CIFAR10, as the dimension goes up we see better results because more of the mass exists on the edge of the ∞-norm ball, making cycling easier.

You can see some simple stats below. Images that get tricked usually need just 3 iterations of PGD to break, and most models don't use even 100 - but there is a long tail in the iterations you need. Lucky fo rus, adaptive step sizes don't improve PGD so much, so we get this fun!

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A second simple observation is that when you do successfully attack an image, you can just stop. Shockingly, no code for PGD in any of the major frameworks checks for this! Once in a cycle you know the future, so also stop. So the complete procedure is very simple.

The crux of the paper is simple, you want a large max iteration count T, but you don't want ot use them all every time! When a model is robust under the L∞ norm, your perturbation starts to cycle in the corners, so you start to do redundant work!

Why does it start to cycle? The solution point exists outside the L∞ ball, and can not be reached. When you use PGD and clip to the sign, you "normalize" the steps and enforce a grid of finite locations for the search to proceed from. Voila, you get cycles!

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(2) the proposed method is very simple. Besides other minor issues, disagreement arises as to whether a very simple but useful idea, as the one proposed here, deserves being published in a prestigious scientific venue such as CVPR. We discussed this extensively during the AC triplet meeting and we

agree that if a paper does convincingly a good service to a research community, that would be enough to warrant publication regardless of the complexity of the underlying idea. We concur with R3, in fact, that "high technical complexity does not necessarily mean novelty or good science.""

I'm currently working through/implementing the Hager Zhang line search b/c I need it for some research, and it's a monster! Would anyone care if I made a tech report on "so you want to implement LBFGs/CG just give me the details"? B/c its really not well documented anywhere.

edwardraffml.bsky.social reposted

If you are at #AAAI2025 come and see our oral presentation today in Room 122A at 11:15AM. The paper "Fairness Issues and Mitigations in (Differentially Private) Socio-demographic Data Processes" shows how sampling errors in survey data can introduce (1/2)

edwardraffml.bsky.social reposted

Replying to @njohnston.ca

First, the claims are that ChatGPT o1 scored 80+ points on the Putnam, or 60+ points, or high enough to be in the top 2% of participants, or whatever other impressive-sounding claim someone can make up.

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Why does this work? The same reason any new feature works. The (selected) Yara atoms have relatively little correlation with the Ember features, even if they have a higher self-similarity due to their construction to target some malware family/functionality of interest.

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Training on only the Yara signatures as features is surprisingly decent as a malware detector! Not amazing, but decent! But the real value here is that they are being created/updated already - and you can add them to your existing feature sets.

We test several ways you can add them based on how much computational cost you want to pay. The idea is basically simple: you have your existing features and concatenate the new features to a representation of the original (could be them, or a logit, or something else).

Yara rules are basically fancy regular expressions. We can take all the 'atoms' of the rule, like $av4, and turn them into binary present/absent features for our model to incorporate. Nature of Yara means these are usually pretty fast to find/extract too 📰https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18516

"But aren't Yara rules very precise, why would they generalize?" Yes, individualy they tend to be very high recall or precision, but not both. Individually though - people use the condition statement to get the final target precision. The atoms themselves are pretty diverse!

edwardraffml.bsky.social reposted

Binary code is pervasive, and binary analysis is a key task in reverse engineering, malware classification, and vulnerability discovery. So, they created Assemblage - the dataset of source-to-binary projects compiled from GitHub. Assemblage - A dataset of binary executable corpuses