Author name cluster

Ian Goodfellow

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13 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MONA: Myopic Optimization with Non-myopic Approval Can Mitigate Multi-step Reward Hacking

Sebastian Farquhar
Vikrant Varma
David Lindner
David Elson
Caleb Biddulph
Ian Goodfellow
Rohin Shah

Future advanced AI systems may learn sophisticated strategies through reinforcement learning (RL) that humans cannot understand well enough to safely evaluate. We propose a training method which avoids agents learning undesired multi-step plans that receive high reward (multi-step "reward hacks") even if humans are not able to detect that the behavior is undesired. The method, Myopic Optimization with Non-myopic Approval (MONA), works by combining short-sighted optimization with far-sighted reward. We demonstrate that MONA can prevent multi-step reward hacking that ordinary RL causes, even without being able to detect the reward hacking and without any extra information that ordinary RL does not get access to. We study MONA empirically in three settings which model different misalignment failure modes including 2-step environments with LLMs representing delegated oversight and encoded reasoning and longer-horizon gridworld environments representing sensor tampering.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Enabling certification of verification-agnostic networks via memory-efficient semidefinite programming

Sumanth Dathathri
Krishnamurthy Dvijotham
Alexey Kurakin
Aditi Raghunathan
Jonathan Uesato
Rudy R. Bunel
Shreya Shankar
Jacob Steinhardt

Convex relaxations have emerged as a promising approach for verifying properties of neural networks, but widely used using Linear Programming (LP) relaxations only provide meaningful certificates when networks are specifically trained to facilitate verification. This precludes many important applications which involve \emph{verification-agnostic} networks that are not trained specifically to promote verifiability. On the other hand, semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations have shown success on verification-agnostic networks, such as adversarially trained image classifiers without additional regularization, but do not currently scale beyond small networks due to poor time and space asymptotics. In this work, we propose a first-order dual SDP algorithm that provides (1) any-time bounds (2) requires memory only linear in the total number of network activations and (3) has per-iteration complexity that scales linearly with the complexity of a forward/backward pass through the network. By exploiting iterative eigenvector methods, we express all solver operations in terms of forward and backward passes through the network, enabling efficient use of hardware optimized for deep learning. This allows us to dramatically improve the magnitude of $\ell_\infty$ perturbations for which we can verify robustness verification-agnostic networks ($1\% \to 88\%$ on MNIST, $6\%\to 40\%$ on CIFAR-10). We also demonstrate tight verification for a quadratic stability specification for the decoder of a variational autoencoder.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

A Domain Agnostic Measure for Monitoring and Evaluating GANs

Paulina Grnarova
Kfir Y. Levy
Aurelien Lucchi
Nathanael Perraudin
Ian Goodfellow
Thomas Hofmann
Andreas Krause

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable results in modeling complex distributions, but their evaluation remains an unsettled issue. Evaluations are essential for: (i) relative assessment of different models and (ii) monitoring the progress of a single model throughout training. The latter cannot be determined by simply inspecting the generator and discriminator loss curves as they behave non-intuitively. We leverage the notion of duality gap from game theory to propose a measure that addresses both (i) and (ii) at a low computational cost. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of this measure to rank different GAN models and capture the typical GAN failure scenarios, including mode collapse and non-convergent behaviours. This evaluation metric also provides meaningful monitoring on the progression of the loss during training. It highly correlates with FID on natural image datasets, and with domain specific scores for text, sound and cosmology data where FID is not directly suitable. In particular, our proposed metric requires no labels or a pretrained classifier, making it domain agnostic.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning

David Berthelot
Nicholas Carlini
Ian Goodfellow
Nicolas Papernot
Avital Oliver
Colin Raffel

Semi-supervised learning has proven to be a powerful paradigm for leveraging unlabeled data to mitigate the reliance on large labeled datasets. In this work, we unify the current dominant approaches for semi-supervised learning to produce a new algorithm, MixMatch, that guesses low-entropy labels for data-augmented unlabeled examples and mixes labeled and unlabeled data using MixUp. MixMatch obtains state-of-the-art results by a large margin across many datasets and labeled data amounts. For example, on CIFAR-10 with 250 labels, we reduce error rate by a factor of 4 (from 38% to 11%) and by a factor of 2 on STL-10. We also demonstrate how MixMatch can help achieve a dramatically better accuracy-privacy trade-off for differential privacy. Finally, we perform an ablation study to tease apart which components of MixMatch are most important for its success. Code is attached.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Adversarial Examples that Fool both Computer Vision and Time-Limited Humans

Gamaleldin Elsayed
Shreya Shankar
Brian Cheung
Nicolas Papernot
Alexey Kurakin
Ian Goodfellow
Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples: small changes to images can cause computer vision models to make mistakes such as identifying a school bus as an ostrich. However, it is still an open question whether humans are prone to similar mistakes. Here, we address this question by leveraging recent techniques that transfer adversarial examples from computer vision models with known parameters and architecture to other models with unknown parameters and architecture, and by matching the initial processing of the human visual system. We find that adversarial examples that strongly transfer across computer vision models influence the classifications made by time-limited human observers.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Realistic Evaluation of Deep Semi-Supervised Learning Algorithms

Avital Oliver
Augustus Odena
Colin Raffel
Ekin Dogus Cubuk
Ian Goodfellow

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a powerful framework for leveraging unlabeled data when labels are limited or expensive to obtain. SSL algorithms based on deep neural networks have recently proven successful on standard benchmark tasks. However, we argue that these benchmarks fail to address many issues that SSL algorithms would face in real-world applications. After creating a unified reimplementation of various widely-used SSL techniques, we test them in a suite of experiments designed to address these issues. We find that the performance of simple baselines which do not use unlabeled data is often underreported, SSL methods differ in sensitivity to the amount of labeled and unlabeled data, and performance can degrade substantially when the unlabeled dataset contains out-of-distribution examples. To help guide SSL research towards real-world applicability, we make our unified reimplemention and evaluation platform publicly available.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps

Julius Adebayo
Justin Gilmer
Michael Muelly
Ian Goodfellow
Moritz Hardt
Been Kim

Saliency methods have emerged as a popular tool to highlight features in an input deemed relevant for the prediction of a learned model. Several saliency methods have been proposed, often guided by visual appeal on image data. In this work, we propose an actionable methodology to evaluate what kinds of explanations a given method can and cannot provide. We find that reliance, solely, on visual assessment can be misleading. Through extensive experiments we show that some existing saliency methods are independent both of the model and of the data generating process. Consequently, methods that fail the proposed tests are inadequate for tasks that are sensitive to either data or model, such as, finding outliers in the data, explaining the relationship between inputs and outputs that the model learned, and debugging the model. We interpret our findings through an analogy with edge detection in images, a technique that requires neither training data nor model. Theory in the case of a linear model and a single-layer convolutional neural network supports our experimental findings.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Improved Techniques for Training GANs

Tim Salimans
Ian Goodfellow
Wojciech Zaremba
Vicki Cheung
Alec Radford
Xi Chen

We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: Our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21. 3%. We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Unsupervised Learning for Physical Interaction through Video Prediction

Chelsea Finn
Ian Goodfellow
Sergey Levine

A core challenge for an agent learning to interact with the world is to predict how its actions affect objects in its environment. Many existing methods for learning the dynamics of physical interactions require labeled object information. However, to scale real-world interaction learning to a variety of scenes and objects, acquiring labeled data becomes increasingly impractical. To learn about physical object motion without labels, we develop an action-conditioned video prediction model that explicitly models pixel motion, by predicting a distribution over pixel motion from previous frames. Because our model explicitly predicts motion, it is partially invariant to object appearance, enabling it to generalize to previously unseen objects. To explore video prediction for real-world interactive agents, we also introduce a dataset of 59, 000 robot interactions involving pushing motions, including a test set with novel objects. In this dataset, accurate prediction of videos conditioned on the robot's future actions amounts to learning a "visual imagination" of different futures based on different courses of action. Our experiments show that our proposed method produces more accurate video predictions both quantitatively and qualitatively, when compared to prior methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Generative Adversarial Nets

Ian Goodfellow
Jean Pouget-Abadie
Mehdi Mirza
Bing Xu
David Warde-Farley
Sherjil Ozair
Aaron Courville
Yoshua Bengio

We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via adversarial nets, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1/2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitatively evaluation of the generated samples.

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AAAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

On the Challenges of Physical Implementations of RBMs

Vincent Dumoulin
Ian Goodfellow
Aaron Courville
Yoshua Bengio

Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are powerful machine learning models, but learning and some kinds of inference in the model require sampling-based approximations, which, in classical digital computers, are implemented using expensive MCMC. Physical computation offers the opportunity to reduce the cost of sampling by building physical systems whose natural dynamics correspond to drawing samples from the desired RBM distribution. Such a system avoids the burn-in and mixing cost of a Markov chain. However, hardware implementations of this variety usually entail limitations such as low-precision and limited range of the parameters and restrictions on the size and topology of the RBM. We conduct software simulations to determine how harmful each of these restrictions is. Our simulations are based on the D-Wave Two computer, but the issues we investigate arise in most forms of physical computation. Our findings suggest that designers of new physical computing hardware and algorithms for physical computers should focus their efforts on overcoming the limitations imposed by the topology restrictions of currently existing physical computers.

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NeurIPS Conference 2013 Conference Paper

Multi-Prediction Deep Boltzmann Machines

Ian Goodfellow
Mehdi Mirza
Aaron Courville
Yoshua Bengio

We introduce the Multi-Prediction Deep Boltzmann Machine (MP-DBM). The MP-DBM can be seen as a single probabilistic model trained to maximize a variational approximation to the generalized pseudolikelihood, or as a family of recurrent nets that share parameters and approximately solve different inference problems. Prior methods of training DBMs either do not perform well on classification tasks or require an initial learning pass that trains the DBM greedily, one layer at a time. The MP-DBM does not require greedy layerwise pretraining, and outperforms the standard DBM at classification, classification with missing inputs, and mean field prediction tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Measuring Invariances in Deep Networks

Ian Goodfellow
Honglak Lee
Quoc Le
Andrew Saxe
Andrew Ng

For many computer vision applications, the ideal image feature would be invariant to multiple confounding image properties, such as illumination and viewing angle. Recently, deep architectures trained in an unsupervised manner have been proposed as an automatic method for extracting useful features. However, outside of using these learning algorithms in a classiﬁer, they can be sometimes difﬁcult to evaluate. In this paper, we propose a number of empirical tests that directly measure the degree to which these learned features are invariant to different image transforms. We ﬁnd that deep autoencoders become invariant to increasingly complex image transformations with depth. This further justiﬁes the use of “deep” vs. “shallower” representations. Our performance metrics agree with existing measures of invariance. Our evaluation metrics can also be used to evaluate future work in unsupervised deep learning, and thus help the development of future algorithms.

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