How Efficient are Deep Neural Networks in 2022 part2

Monodeep Mukherjee
3 min readOct 6, 2022
Photo by Jon-Ade Holter on Unsplash

1.Verifiable and Energy Efficient Medical Image Analysis with Quantised Self-attentive DeepNeural Networks (arXiv)

Author : Rakshith Sathish, Swanand Khare, Debdoot Sheet

Abstract : Convolutional Neural Networks have played a significant role in various medical imaging tasks like classification and segmentation. They provide state-of-the-art performance compared to classical image processing algorithms. However, the major downside of these methods is the high computational complexity, reliance on high-performance hardware like GPUs and the inherent black-box nature of the model. In this paper, we propose quantised stand-alone self-attention based models as an alternative to traditional CNNs. In the proposed class of networks, convolutional layers are replaced with stand-alone self-attention layers, and the network parameters are quantised after training. We experimentally validate the performance of our method on classification and segmentation tasks. We observe a 50−80% reduction in model size, 60−80% lesser number of parameters, 40−85% fewer FLOPs and 65−80% more energy efficiency during inference on CPUs. The code will be available at \href {https://github.com/Rakshith2597/Quantised-Self-Attentive-Deep-Neural-Network}{https://github.com/Rakshith2597/Quantised-Self-Attentive-Deep-Neural-Network}.

2. Towards Lightweight Black-Box Attacks against Deep Neural Networks(arXiv)

Author : Chenghao Sun, Yonggang Zhang, Wan Chaoqun, Qizhou Wang, Ya Li, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, Xinmei Tian

Abstract : Black-box attacks can generate adversarial examples without accessing the parameters of target model, largely exacerbating the threats of deployed deep neural networks (DNNs). However, previous works state that black-box attacks fail to mislead target models when their training data and outputs are inaccessible. In this work, we argue that black-box attacks can pose practical attacks in this extremely restrictive scenario where only several test samples are available. Specifically, we find that attacking the shallow layers of DNNs trained on a few test samples can generate powerful adversarial examples. As only a few samples are required, we refer to these attacks as lightweight black-box attacks. The main challenge to promoting lightweight attacks is to mitigate the adverse impact caused by the approximation error of shallow layers. As it is hard to mitigate the approximation error with few available samples, we propose Error TransFormer (ETF) for lightweight attacks. Namely, ETF transforms the approximation error in the parameter space into a perturbation in the feature space and alleviates the error by disturbing features. In experiments, lightweight black-box attacks with the proposed ETF achieve surprising results. For example, even if only 1 sample per category available, the attack success rate in lightweight black-box attacks is only about 3% lower than that of the black-box attacks with complete training data.

3.A Closer Look at Evaluating the Bit-Flip Attack Against Deep Neural Networks (arXiv)

Author : Kevin Hector, Mathieu Dumont, Pierre-Alain Moellic, Jean-Max Dutertre

Abstract : Deep neural network models are massively deployed on a wide variety of hardware platforms. This results in the appearance of new attack vectors that significantly extend the standard attack surface, extensively studied by the adversarial machine learning community. One of the first attack that aims at drastically dropping the performance of a model, by targeting its parameters (weights) stored in memory, is the Bit-Flip Attack (BFA). In this work, we point out several evaluation challenges related to the BFA. First of all, the lack of an adversary’s budget in the standard threat model is problematic, especially when dealing with physical attacks. Moreover, since the BFA presents critical variability, we discuss the influence of some training parameters and the importance of the model architecture. This work is the first to present the impact of the BFA against fully-connected architectures that present different behaviors compared to convolutional neural networks. These results highlight the importance of defining robust and sound evaluation methodologies to properly evaluate the dangers of parameter-based attacks as well as measure the real level of robustness offered by a defense.

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Monodeep Mukherjee

Universe Enthusiast. Writes about Computer Science, AI, Physics, Neuroscience and Technology,Front End and Backend Development