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Travis Zhang

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3 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

On Speeding Up Language Model Evaluation

Jin Peng Zhou
Christian K. Belardi
Ruihan Wu
Travis Zhang
Carla P. Gomes
Wen Sun 0002
Kilian Q. Weinberger

Developing prompt-based methods with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires making numerous decisions, which give rise to a combinatorial search problem over hyper-parameters. This exhaustive evaluation can be time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we propose an \textit{adaptive} approach to explore this space. We are exploiting the fact that often only few samples are needed to identify clearly superior or inferior settings, and that many evaluation tests are highly correlated. We lean on multi-armed bandits to sequentially identify the next (method, validation sample)-pair to evaluate and utilize low-rank matrix factorization to fill in missing evaluations. We carefully assess the efficacy of our approach on several competitive benchmark problems and show that it can identify the top-performing method using only 5-15% of the typical resources---resulting in 85-95% LLM cost savings. Our code is available at https://github.com/kilian-group/banditeval.

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ICRA Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Targeted Attack on Deep RL-based Autonomous Driving with Learned Visual Patterns

Prasanth Buddareddygari
Travis Zhang
Yezhou Yang
Yi Ren

Recent studies demonstrated the vulnerability of control policies learned through deep reinforcement learning against adversarial attacks, raising concerns about the application of such models to risk-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. Threat models for these demonstrations are limited to (1) targeted attacks through real-time manipulation of the agent's observation, and (2) untargeted attacks through manipulation of the physical environment. The former assumes full access to the agent's states/observations at all times, while the latter has no control over attack outcomes. This paper investigates the feasibility of targeted attacks through visually learned patterns placed on physical objects in the environment, a threat model that combines the practicality and effectiveness of the existing ones. Through analysis, we demonstrate that a pre-trained policy can be hijacked within a time window, e. g. , performing an unintended self-parking, when an adversarial object is present. To enable the attack, we adopt an assumption that the dynamics of both the environment and the agent can be learned by the attacker. Lastly, we empirically show the effectiveness of the proposed attack on different driving scenarios, perform a location robustness test, and study the tradeoff between the attack strength and its effectiveness Code is available at https://github.com/ASU-APG/Targeted-Physical-Adversarial-Attacks-on-AD

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Unsupervised Adaptation from Repeated Traversals for Autonomous Driving

Yurong You
Cheng Perng Phoo
Katie Luo
Travis Zhang
Wei-Lun Chao
Bharath Hariharan
Mark Campbell
Kilian Q. Weinberger

For a self-driving car to operate reliably, its perceptual system must generalize to the end-user's environment --- ideally without additional annotation efforts. One potential solution is to leverage unlabeled data (e. g. , unlabeled LiDAR point clouds) collected from the end-users' environments (i. e. target domain) to adapt the system to the difference between training and testing environments. While extensive research has been done on such an unsupervised domain adaptation problem, one fundamental problem lingers: there is no reliable signal in the target domain to supervise the adaptation process. To overcome this issue we observe that it is easy to collect unsupervised data from multiple traversals of repeated routes. While different from conventional unsupervised domain adaptation, this assumption is extremely realistic since many drivers share the same roads. We show that this simple additional assumption is sufficient to obtain a potent signal that allows us to perform iterative self-training of 3D object detectors on the target domain. Concretely, we generate pseudo-labels with the out-of-domain detector but reduce false positives by removing detections of supposedly mobile objects that are persistent across traversals. Further, we reduce false negatives by encouraging predictions in regions that are not persistent. We experiment with our approach on two large-scale driving datasets and show remarkable improvement in 3D object detection of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, bringing us a step closer to generalizable autonomous driving.

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