arXiv subjects

Pratik Vaishnavi

Publications and source records attributed to Pratik Vaishnavi.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Agentic ML Exploration (A-MLE) for Ads Ranking

Modern industrial ads ranking stacks are increasingly bottlenecked not by model capacity or training compute, but by the throughput of human ML iteration - the cycles of research, implementation, training, debugging, evaluation, and launch required to surface a single statistically significant improvement. A typical ranking stack contains numerous differentiated models with heterogeneous data, architectures, and infrastructure constraints, and each cycle takes days to weeks of senior engineer attention per model. As a result, techniques that have proven effective on one model diffuse into others slowly and unevenly, leaving substantial recoverable signal unexplored. We present Agentic ML Exploration (A-MLE), an autonomous LLM-agent system that systematically explores ML techniques across a portfolio of ads ranking models. A-MLE decomposes ML iteration into five stages involving hypothesis generation, exploration strategy, experiment execution, result analysis and shared knowledge substrate which are orchestrated by a single agent that invokes domain-specific skills and agentic workflows against a sandboxed execution layer, with human-in-the-loop checkpoints at each stage boundary. We deploy A-MLE across a representative set of large-scale ads ranking models and evaluate it along a tiered capability framework (tool availability, autonomous workflow execution, and open-ended exploration). We further report a controlled cross-LLM study using a fixed agent loop, which surfaces qualitative differences in execution reliability and exploration aggressiveness across the Claude Sonnet, Gemini, and GPT families. We discuss failure modes and the design choices that govern reliability. Our findings suggest that agentic exploration is a practical force multiplier for ML engineers in industrial recommenders, especially for the long tail of models that rarely receive expert attention.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Taking off the Rose-Tinted Glasses: A Critical Look at Adversarial ML Through the Lens of Evasion Attacks

The vulnerability of machine learning models in adversarial scenarios has garnered significant interest in the academic community over the past decade, resulting in a myriad of attacks and defenses. However, while the community appears to be overtly successful in devising new attacks across new contexts, the development of defenses has stalled. After a decade of research, we appear no closer to securing AI applications beyond additional training. Despite a lack of effective mitigations, AI development and its incorporation into existing systems charge full speed ahead with the rise of generative AI and large language models. Will our ineffectiveness in developing solutions to adversarial threats further extend to these new technologies? In this paper, we argue that overly permissive attack and overly restrictive defensive threat models have hampered defense development in the ML domain. Through the lens of adversarial evasion attacks against neural networks, we critically examine common attack assumptions, such as the ability to bypass any defense not explicitly built into the model. We argue that these flawed assumptions, seen as reasonable by the community based on paper acceptance, have encouraged the development of adversarial attacks that map poorly to real-world scenarios. In turn, new defenses evaluated against these very attacks are inadvertently required to be almost perfect and incorporated as part of the model. But do they need to? In practice, machine learning models are deployed as a small component of a larger system. We analyze adversarial machine learning from a system security perspective rather than an AI perspective and its implications for emerging AI paradigms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Accelerating Certified Robustness Training via Knowledge Transfer

Training deep neural network classifiers that are certifiably robust against adversarial attacks is critical to ensuring the security and reliability of AI-controlled systems. Although numerous state-of-the-art certified training methods have been developed, they are computationally expensive and scale poorly with respect to both dataset and network complexity. Widespread usage of certified training is further hindered by the fact that periodic retraining is necessary to incorporate new data and network improvements. In this paper, we propose Certified Robustness Transfer (CRT), a general-purpose framework for reducing the computational overhead of any certifiably robust training method through knowledge transfer. Given a robust teacher, our framework uses a novel training loss to transfer the teacher's robustness to the student. We provide theoretical and empirical validation of CRT. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 show that CRT speeds up certified robustness training by $8 \times$ on average across three different architecture generations while achieving comparable robustness to state-of-the-art methods. We also show that CRT can scale to large-scale datasets like ImageNet.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Ares: A System-Oriented Wargame Framework for Adversarial ML

Since the discovery of adversarial attacks against machine learning models nearly a decade ago, research on adversarial machine learning has rapidly evolved into an eternal war between defenders, who seek to increase the robustness of ML models against adversarial attacks, and adversaries, who seek to develop better attacks capable of weakening or defeating these defenses. This domain, however, has found little buy-in from ML practitioners, who are neither overtly concerned about these attacks affecting their systems in the real world nor are willing to trade off the accuracy of their models in pursuit of robustness against these attacks. In this paper, we motivate the design and implementation of Ares, an evaluation framework for adversarial ML that allows researchers to explore attacks and defenses in a realistic wargame-like environment. Ares frames the conflict between the attacker and defender as two agents in a reinforcement learning environment with opposing objectives. This allows the introduction of system-level evaluation metrics such as time to failure and evaluation of complex strategies such as moving target defenses. We provide the results of our initial exploration involving a white-box attacker against an adversarially trained defender.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Transferring Adversarial Robustness Through Robust Representation Matching

With the widespread use of machine learning, concerns over its security and reliability have become prevalent. As such, many have developed defenses to harden neural networks against adversarial examples, imperceptibly perturbed inputs that are reliably misclassified. Adversarial training in which adversarial examples are generated and used during training is one of the few known defenses able to reliably withstand such attacks against neural networks. However, adversarial training imposes a significant training overhead and scales poorly with model complexity and input dimension. In this paper, we propose Robust Representation Matching (RRM), a low-cost method to transfer the robustness of an adversarially trained model to a new model being trained for the same task irrespective of architectural differences. Inspired by student-teacher learning, our method introduces a novel training loss that encourages the student to learn the teacher's robust representations. Compared to prior works, RRM is superior with respect to both model performance and adversarial training time. On CIFAR-10, RRM trains a robust model $\sim 1.8\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, RRM remains effective on higher-dimensional datasets. On Restricted-ImageNet, RRM trains a ResNet50 model $\sim 18\times$ faster than standard adversarial training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Can Attention Masks Improve Adversarial Robustness?

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are maliciously crafted inputs that are designed to fool a model, but appear normal to human beings. Recent work has shown that pixel discretization can be used to make classifiers for MNIST highly robust to adversarial examples. However, pixel discretization fails to provide significant protection on more complex datasets. In this paper, we take the first step towards reconciling these contrary findings. Focusing on the observation that discrete pixelization in MNIST makes the background completely black and foreground completely white, we hypothesize that the important property for increasing robustness is the elimination of image background using attention masks before classifying an object. To examine this hypothesis, we create foreground attention masks for two different datasets, GTSRB and MS-COCO. Our initial results suggest that using attention mask leads to improved robustness. On the adversarially trained classifiers, we see an adversarial robustness increase of over 20% on MS-COCO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Towards Model-Agnostic Adversarial Defenses using Adversarially Trained Autoencoders

Adversarial machine learning is a well-studied field of research where an adversary causes predictable errors in a machine learning algorithm through precise manipulation of the input. Numerous techniques have been proposed to harden machine learning algorithms and mitigate the effect of adversarial attacks. Of these techniques, adversarial training, which augments the training data with adversarial samples, has proven to be an effective defense with respect to a certain class of attacks. However, adversarial training is computationally expensive and its improvements are limited to a single model. In this work, we take a first step toward creating a model-agnostic adversarial defense. We propose Adversarially-Trained Autoencoder Augmentation (AAA), the first model-agnostic adversarial defense that is robust against certain adaptive adversaries. We show that AAA allows us to achieve a partially model-agnostic defense by training a single autoencoder to protect multiple pre-trained classifiers; achieving adversarial performance on par or better than adversarial training without modifying the classifiers. Furthermore, we demonstrate that AAA can be used to create a fully model-agnostic defense for MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets by improving the adversarial performance of a never before seen pre-trained classifier by at least 45% with no additional training. Finally, using a natural image corruption dataset, we show that our approach improves robustness to naturally corrupted images,which has been identified as strongly indicative of true adversarial robustness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Robust Classification using Robust Feature Augmentation

Existing deep neural networks, say for image classification, have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial images that can cause a DNN misclassification, without any perceptible change to an image. In this work, we propose shock absorbing robust features such as binarization, e.g., rounding, and group extraction, e.g., color or shape, to augment the classification pipeline, resulting in more robust classifiers. Experimentally, we show that augmenting ML models with these techniques leads to improved overall robustness on adversarial inputs as well as significant improvements in training time. On the MNIST dataset, we achieved 14x speedup in training time to obtain 90% adversarial accuracy com-pared to the state-of-the-art adversarial training method of Madry et al., as well as retained higher adversarial accuracy over a broader range of attacks. We also find robustness improvements on traffic sign classification using robust feature augmentation. Finally, we give theoretical insights for why one can expect robust feature augmentation to reduce adversarial input space

cs.LG↗