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Vasu Singla

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4 papers

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Understanding and Mitigating Copying in Diffusion Models

Gowthami Somepalli
Vasu Singla
Micah Goldblum
Jonas Geiping
Tom Goldstein

Images generated by diffusion models like Stable Diffusion are increasingly widespread. Recent works and even lawsuits have shown that these models are prone to replicating their training data, unbeknownst to the user. In this paper, we first analyze this memorization problem in text-to-image diffusion models. While it is widely believed that duplicated images in the training set are responsible for content replication at inference time, we observe that the text conditioning of the model plays a similarly important role. In fact, we see in our experiments that data replication often does not happen for unconditional models, while it is common in the text-conditional case. Motivated by our findings, we then propose several techniques for reducing data replication at both training and inference time by randomizing and augmenting image captions in the training set. Code is available at https: //github. com/somepago/DCR.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

What Can We Learn from Unlearnable Datasets?

Pedro Sandoval-Segura
Vasu Singla
Jonas Geiping
Micah Goldblum
Tom Goldstein

In an era of widespread web scraping, unlearnable dataset methods have the potential to protect data privacy by preventing deep neural networks from generalizing. But in addition to a number of practical limitations that make their use unlikely, we make a number of findings that call into question their ability to safeguard data. First, it is widely believed that neural networks trained on unlearnable datasets only learn shortcuts, simpler rules that are not useful for generalization. In contrast, we find that networks actually can learn useful features that can be reweighed for high test performance, suggesting that image protection is not assured. Unlearnable datasets are also believed to induce learning shortcuts through linear separability of added perturbations. We provide a counterexample, demonstrating that linear separability of perturbations is not a necessary condition. To emphasize why linearly separable perturbations should not be relied upon, we propose an orthogonal projection attack which allows learning from unlearnable datasets published in ICML 2021 and ICLR 2023. Our proposed attack is significantly less complex than recently proposed techniques.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Autoregressive Perturbations for Data Poisoning

Pedro Sandoval-Segura
Vasu Singla
Jonas Geiping
Micah Goldblum
Tom Goldstein
David Jacobs

The prevalence of data scraping from social media as a means to obtain datasets has led to growing concerns regarding unauthorized use of data. Data poisoning attacks have been proposed as a bulwark against scraping, as they make data ``unlearnable'' by adding small, imperceptible perturbations. Unfortunately, existing methods require knowledge of both the target architecture and the complete dataset so that a surrogate network can be trained, the parameters of which are used to generate the attack. In this work, we introduce autoregressive (AR) poisoning, a method that can generate poisoned data without access to the broader dataset. The proposed AR perturbations are generic, can be applied across different datasets, and can poison different architectures. Compared to existing unlearnable methods, our AR poisons are more resistant against common defenses such as adversarial training and strong data augmentations. Our analysis further provides insight into what makes an effective data poison.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Shift Invariance Can Reduce Adversarial Robustness

Vasu Singla
Songwei Ge
Basri Ronen
David Jacobs

Shift invariance is a critical property of CNNs that improves performance on classification. However, we show that invariance to circular shifts can also lead to greater sensitivity to adversarial attacks. We first characterize the margin between classes when a shift-invariant {\em linear} classifier is used. We show that the margin can only depend on the DC component of the signals. Then, using results about infinitely wide networks, we show that in some simple cases, fully connected and shift-invariant neural networks produce linear decision boundaries. Using this, we prove that shift invariance in neural networks produces adversarial examples for the simple case of two classes, each consisting of a single image with a black or white dot on a gray background. This is more than a curiosity; we show empirically that with real datasets and realistic architectures, shift invariance reduces adversarial robustness. Finally, we describe initial experiments using synthetic data to probe the source of this connection.

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