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Raghav Somani

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

6 papers
2 author rows

Possible papers

6

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Defense against backdoor attacks via robust covariance estimation

  • Jonathan Hayase
  • Weihao Kong
  • Raghav Somani
  • Sewoong Oh

Modern machine learning increasingly requires training on a large collection of data from multiple sources, not all of which can be trusted. A particularly frightening scenario is when a small fraction of corrupted data changes the behavior of the trained model when triggered by an attacker-specified watermark. Such a compromised model will be deployed unnoticed as the model is accurate otherwise. There has been promising attempts to use the intermediate representations of such a model to separate corrupted examples from clean ones. However, these methods require a significant fraction of the data to be corrupted, in order to have strong enough signal for detection. We propose a novel defense algorithm using robust covariance estimation to amplify the spectral signature of corrupted data. This defense is able to completely remove backdoors whenever the benchmark backdoor attacks are successful, even in regimes where previous methods have no hope for detecting poisoned examples.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

LLC: Accurate, Multi-purpose Learnt Low-dimensional Binary Codes

  • Aditya Kusupati
  • Matthew Wallingford
  • Vivek Ramanujan
  • Raghav Somani
  • Jae Sung Park
  • Krishna Pillutla
  • Prateek Jain
  • Sham Kakade

Learning binary representations of instances and classes is a classical problem with several high potential applications. In modern settings, the compression of high-dimensional neural representations to low-dimensional binary codes is a challenging task and often require large bit-codes to be accurate. In this work, we propose a novel method for $\textbf{L}$earning $\textbf{L}$ow-dimensional binary $\textbf{C}$odes $(\textbf{LLC})$ for instances as well as classes. Our method does ${\textit{not}}$ require any side-information, like annotated attributes or label meta-data, and learns extremely low-dimensional binary codes ($\approx 20$ bits for ImageNet-1K). The learnt codes are super-efficient while still ensuring $\textit{nearly optimal}$ classification accuracy for ResNet50 on ImageNet-1K. We demonstrate that the learnt codes capture intrinsically important features in the data, by discovering an intuitive taxonomy over classes. We further quantitatively measure the quality of our codes by applying it to the efficient image retrieval as well as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problems. For ImageNet-100 retrieval problem, our learnt binary codes outperform $16$ bit HashNet using only $10$ bits and also are as accurate as $10$ dimensional real representations. Finally, our learnt binary codes can perform OOD detection, out-of-the-box, as accurately as a baseline that needs $\approx3000$ samples to tune its threshold, while we require ${\textit{none}}$. Code is open-sourced at https: //github. com/RAIVNLab/LLC.

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Meta-learning for Mixed Linear Regression

  • Weihao Kong
  • Raghav Somani
  • Zhao Song 0002
  • Sham M. Kakade
  • Sewoong Oh

In modern supervised learning, there are a large number of tasks, but many of them are associated with only a small amount of labelled data. These include data from medical image processing and robotic interaction. Even though each individual task cannot be meaningfully trained in isolation, one seeks to meta-learn across the tasks from past experiences by exploiting some similarities. We study a fundamental question of interest: When can abundant tasks with small data compensate for lack of tasks with big data? We focus on a canonical scenario where each task is drawn from a mixture of $k$ linear regressions, and identify sufficient conditions for such a graceful exchange to hold; there is little loss in sample complexity even when we only have access to small data tasks. To this end, we introduce a novel spectral approach and show that we can efficiently utilize small data tasks with the help of $\tilde\Omega(k^{3/2})$ medium data tasks each with $\tilde\Omega(k^{1/2})$ examples.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Robust Meta-learning for Mixed Linear Regression with Small Batches

  • Weihao Kong
  • Raghav Somani
  • Sham Kakade
  • Sewoong Oh

A common challenge faced in practical supervised learning, such as medical image processing and robotic interactions, is that there are plenty of tasks but each task cannot afford to collect enough labeled examples to be learned in isolation. However, by exploiting the similarities across those tasks, one can hope to overcome such data scarcity. Under a canonical scenario where each task is drawn from a mixture of $k$ linear regressions, we study a fundamental question: can abundant small-data tasks compensate for the lack of big-data tasks? Existing second moment based approaches of \cite{2020arXiv200208936K} show that such a trade-off is efficiently achievable, with the help of medium-sized tasks with $\Omega(k^{1/2})$ examples each. However, this algorithm is brittle in two important scenarios. The predictions can be arbitrarily bad $(i)$ even with only a few outliers in the dataset; or $(ii)$ even if the medium-sized tasks are slightly smaller with $o(k^{1/2})$ examples each. We introduce a spectral approach that is simultaneously robust under both scenarios. To this end, we first design a novel outlier-robust principal component analysis algorithm that achieves an optimal accuracy. This is followed by a sum-of-squares algorithm to exploit the information from higher order moments. Together, this approach is robust against outliers and achieves a graceful statistical trade-off; the lack of $\Omega(k^{1/2})$-size tasks can be compensated for with smaller tasks, which can now be as small as ${\cal O}(\log k)$.

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Soft Threshold Weight Reparameterization for Learnable Sparsity

  • Aditya Kusupati
  • Vivek Ramanujan
  • Raghav Somani
  • Mitchell Wortsman
  • Prateek Jain 0002
  • Sham M. Kakade
  • Ali Farhadi

Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is studied extensively with the focus of maximizing prediction accuracy given an overall parameter budget. Existing methods rely on uniform or heuristic non-uniform sparsity budgets which have sub-optimal layer-wise parameter allocation resulting in a) lower prediction accuracy or b) higher inference cost (FLOPs). This work proposes Soft Threshold Reparameterization (STR), a novel use of the soft-threshold operator on DNN weights. STR smoothly induces sparsity while learning pruning thresholds thereby obtaining a non-uniform sparsity budget. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for unstructured sparsity in CNNs (ResNet50 and MobileNetV1 on ImageNet-1K), and, additionally, learns non-uniform budgets that empirically reduce the FLOPs by up to 50%. Notably, STR boosts the accuracy over existing results by up to 10% in the ultra sparse (99%) regime and can also be used to induce low-rank (structured sparsity) in RNNs. In short, STR is a simple mechanism which learns effective sparsity budgets that contrast with popular heuristics. Code, pretrained models and sparsity budgets are at https: //github. com/RAIVNLab/STR.

NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Support Recovery for Orthogonal Matching Pursuit: Upper and Lower bounds

  • Raghav Somani
  • Chirag Gupta
  • Prateek Jain
  • Praneeth Netrapalli

This paper studies the problem of sparse regression where the goal is to learn a sparse vector that best optimizes a given objective function. Under the assumption that the objective function satisfies restricted strong convexity (RSC), we analyze orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), a greedy algorithm that is used heavily in applications, and obtain support recovery result as well as a tight generalization error bound for OMP. Furthermore, we obtain lower bounds for OMP, showing that both our results on support recovery and generalization error are tight up to logarithmic factors. To the best of our knowledge, these support recovery and generalization bounds are the first such matching upper and lower bounds (up to logarithmic factors) for {\em any} sparse regression algorithm under the RSC assumption.

v2026.09.13