paperlist.ai

AI conference papers

AI conference paper library

Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

arXiv

Just Repair: A Minimal Denoising Network for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Kadir-Kaan Özer, René Ebeling, Markus Enzweiler

Time series anomaly detectors have grown steadily more complex, incorporating attention mechanisms, adversarial training, and stochastic latent variables. Yet, it is unclear how much of this machinery detection actually requires. We test this question with JuRe (Just Repair), a deliberately minimal detector: a single depthwise-separable convolutional residual block trained to repair Gaussian-corrupted, channel-masked windows, scored at inference by a fixed structural discrepancy function with no learned parameters. JuRe ranks second on the TSB-AD multivariate benchmark (AUC-PR 0.404 over 180 series) and second on the UCR univariate archive (AUC-PR 0.201 over 250 series), where it leads all neural baselines. On TSB-AD, JuRe runs roughly $20\times$ faster than AxonAD, one of the top-ranked methods on that benchmark. Full-benchmark ablations show that removing Gaussian corruption reduces AUC-PR by 0.046, whereas AUC-PR across the evaluated architecture variants spans at most 0.017. A synthetic linear-manifold experiment provides partial evidence for this geometric interpretation: anomaly scores correlate with true off-manifold distance (Pearson $r=0.725$), and repair directions align increasingly with the true projection as anomaly magnitude grows. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm correction find significant differences against 20 of 25 baselines, although dependence among series limits dataset-level interpretation. Code is available at https://github.com/iis-esslingen/JuRe.

arXiv

Multi-Branch Policy Optimization for Multimodal Large Language Models

Shuai Lyu, Yuning Gong, Ruiling Gao, Xiaoran Shang, Zhonghong Ou, Ping Zong, Yifan Zhu, Yuan Sun, Yang Qin, Peng Hu

Group-based reinforcement learning methods for multimodal large language models typically rely on trajectory-level credit assignment that applies a single advantage to all tokens in a response. However, multimodal reasoning involves substantially higher perceptual uncertainty than text-only settings, where the model must repeatedly re-examine visual information to verify intermediate interpretations, and different visual groundings can lead to divergent reasoning paths, making such uniform credit assignment particularly inadequate and causing relative advantages to progressively degenerate toward zero. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-Branch Policy Optimization (MBPO), a tree-based framework that constructs reasoning trees at vision-language decision boundaries, enabling sibling branches to explore diverse visual hypotheses and assigning segment-level credit through branch-relative advantages. We further introduce a temporal replay buffer to reuse informative segments while controlling policy staleness. Experiments on several multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that MBPO outperforms representative baselines, improving both learning signal quality and optimization efficiency. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShuaiLyu0110/MBPO.

arXiv

SHIELD: A Segmented Hierarchical Memory Architecture for Energy-Efficient LLM Inference on Edge NPUs

Jintao Zhang, Xuanyao Fong

Large Language Model (LLM) inference on edge Neural Processing Units (NPUs) is fundamentally constrained by limited on-chip memory capacity. Although high-density embedded DRAM (eDRAM) is attractive for storing activation workspaces, its periodic refresh consumes substantial energy. Prior work has primarily focused on reducing off-chip traffic or optimizing refresh for persistent Key-Value (KV) caches, while transient and error-resilient Query and Attention Output (QO) activations are largely overlooked. We propose SHIELD, a lifecycle-aware segmented eDRAM architecture that jointly exploits temporal residency and bit-level sensitivity in bfloat16 (BF16) activations. SHIELD isolates the sign and exponent fields from the mantissa, disables refresh for transient QO mantissas, and applies relaxed refresh to persistent KV mantissas. Across multiple LLMs and inference scenarios, SHIELD reduces eDRAM refresh energy by 35% relative to a standard-refresh baseline while preserving accuracy on WikiText-2, PIQA, and ARC-Easy.

arXiv

Koopman-Based Nonlinear Identification and Model Predictive Control of a Turbofan Engine

David Grasev

This paper investigates Koopman operator-based approaches for multivariable control of a two-spool turbofan engine. A physics-based component-level model is developed to generate training data and validate the controllers. A meta-heuristic extended dynamic mode decomposition is adapted, with a cost function designed to accurately capture both spool-speed dynamics and the engine pressure ratio (EPR), enabling the construction of a single Koopman model that can be reused across multiple control strategies. Using the identified time-varying Koopman model, an adaptive Koopman-based model predictive controller (AKMPC) with a disturbance observer is developed and compared with a Koopman-based feedback linearization controller (K-FBLC) and its integrator-augmented version (K-FBLC-I). The Koopman representation further enables nonlinear GTE output limiters, such as rotor-acceleration and turbine-inlet-temperature limits, to be expressed as linear constraints in the AKMPC. The controllers are evaluated for two control configurations of spool speeds and EPR, under both sea-level and varying flight conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed identification approach enables accurate predictions of both spool speeds and EPR, allowing the Koopman model to be reused flexibly across different control formulations. While all strategies achieve comparable performance in sea-level conditions, the AKMPC demonstrates improved performance under varying flight conditions due to its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics, handle constraints, and compensate for model mismatch. Moreover, the EPR control strategy improves the thrust response. The study highlights the applicability of Koopman-based control and the advantages of the AKMPC framework for robust turbofan engine control.

arXiv

Imitation Learning from Human Motion Alone Does Not Guarantee Biomechanically Plausible Gait Kinetics

Xinyi Liu, Jangwhan Ahn, Edgar Lobaton, Jennie Si, He Huang

Motion imitation learning (IL) is increasingly used in robotics and human gait modeling, yet its ability to recover biomechanically consistent joint moments without explicit kinetic information remains unclear. In this study, we examined whether motion imitation alone can estimate reasonable biological joint moments. We compare motion-only IL (MOIL) against a kinetics-aware IL (KAIL) framework that incorporates ground reaction forces (GRF) and center of pressure (CoP) in imitation rewards, with an ablation study to examine the contribution of each kinetic term. Experiments were conducted using walking data from a non-disabled participant at three speeds (0.9, 1.2, and 1.5 m/s). While both MOIL and KAIL achieved comparable kinematic tracking accuracy, MOIL exhibited substantially larger errors in GRF, CoP, and joint moment estimates relative to inverse dynamics references. In contrast, KAIL produced kinetics more consistent with biomechanical values. These findings highlight a fundamental limitation of MOIL approaches, which may lead to erroneous interpretations of gait biomechanics and downstream applications by failing to estimate consistent human-like gait kinetics.

arXiv

Simultaneous estimation of multiple discrete unimodal distributions under stochastic order constraints

Yasuhiro Yoshida, Noriyoshi Sukegawa, Jiro Iwanaga

We study the problem of estimating multiple discrete unimodal distributions, motivated by search behavior analysis on a real-world platform. To incorporate prior knowledge of precedence relations among distributions, we impose stochastic order constraints and formulate the estimation task as a mixed-integer convex quadratic optimization problem. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed method reduces the Jensen-Shannon divergence by 2.2% on average (up to 6.3%) when the sample size is small, while performing comparably to existing methods when sufficient data are available.

arXiv

stratum: A System Infrastructure for Massive Agent-Centric ML Workloads

Arnab Phani, Elias Strauss, Sebastian Schelter

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) transform how machine learning (ML) pipelines are developed and evaluated. LLMs enable a new type of workload, agentic pipeline search, in which autonomous or semi-autonomous agents generate, validate, and optimize complete ML pipelines. These agents predominantly operate over popular Python ML libraries and exhibit highly exploratory behavior. This results in thousands of executions for data profiling, pipeline generation, and iterative refinement of pipeline stages. However, the existing Python-based ML ecosystem is built around libraries such as Pandas and scikit-learn, which are designed for human-centric, interactive, sequential workflows and remain constrained by Python's interpretive execution model, library-level isolation, and limited runtime support for executing large numbers of pipelines. Meanwhile, many high-performance ML systems proposed by the systems community either target narrow workload classes or require specialized programming models, which limits their integration with the Python ML ecosystem and makes them largely ill-suited for LLM-based agents. This growing mismatch exposes a fundamental systems challenge in supporting agentic pipeline search at scale. We therefore propose stratum, a unified system infrastructure that decouples pipeline execution from planning and reasoning during agentic pipeline search. Stratum integrates seamlessly with existing Python libraries, compiles batches of pipelines into optimized execution graphs, and efficiently executes them across heterogeneous backends, including a novel Rust-based runtime. We present stratum's architectural vision along with an early prototype, discuss key design decisions, and outline open challenges and research directions. Finally, preliminary experiments show that stratum can significantly speed up large-scale agentic pipeline search up to 16.6x.

arXiv

RooflineBench: A Benchmarking Framework for On-Device LLMs via Roofline Analysis

Zhen Bi, Xueshu Chen, Luoyang Sun, Yuhang Yao, Qing Shen, Jungang Lou, Cheng Deng

The transition toward localized intelligence through Small Language Models (SLMs) has intensified the need for rigorous performance characterization on resource-constrained edge hardware. However, objectively measuring the theoretical performance ceilings of diverse architectures across heterogeneous platforms remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we propose a systematic framework based on the Roofline model that unifies architectural primitives and hardware constraints through the lens of operational intensity (OI). By defining an inference-potential region, we introduce the Relative Inference Potential as a novel metric to compare efficiency differences between Large Language Models (LLMs) on the same hardware substrate. Extensive empirical analysis across diverse compute tiers reveals that variations in performance and OI are significantly influenced by sequence length. We further identify a critical regression in OI as model depth increases. Additionally, our findings highlight an efficiency trap induced by hardware heterogeneity and demonstrate how structural refinements, such as Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), can effectively unlock latent inference potential across various hardware substrates. These insights provide actionable directions for hardware-software co-design to align neural structures with physical constraints in on-device intelligence. The released code is available in the Appendix C.

arXiv

MemFly: On-the-Fly Memory Optimization via Information Bottleneck

Zhenyuan Zhang, Xianzhang Jia, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenbo Song, Wei Xue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo

Long-term memory enables large language model agents to tackle complex tasks through historical interactions. However, existing frameworks encounter a fundamental dilemma between compressing redundant information efficiently and maintaining precise retrieval for downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose MemFly, a framework grounded in information bottleneck principles that facilitates on-the-fly memory evolution for LLMs. Our approach minimizes compression entropy while maximizing relevance entropy via a gradient-free optimizer, constructing a stratified memory structure for efficient storage. To fully leverage MemFly, we develop a hybrid retrieval mechanism that seamlessly integrates semantic, symbolic, and topological pathways, incorporating iterative refinement to handle complex multi-hop queries. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MemFly substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in memory coherence, response fidelity, and accuracy.

arXiv

Non-Stationary Inventory Control with Lead Times

Nele H. Amiri, Sean R. Sinclair, Maximiliano Udenio

We study non-stationary single-item, periodic-review inventory control problems in which the demand distribution is unknown and may change over time. We analyze how demand non-stationarity affects learning performance across inventory models, including systems with demand backlogging or lost-sales, both with and without lead times. For each setting, we propose an adaptive online algorithm that optimizes over the class of base-stock policies and establish performance guarantees in terms of dynamic regret relative to the optimal base-stock policy at each time step. The algorithms leverage the convexity and one-sided feedback structure of inventory costs to enable counterfactual policy evaluation despite demand censoring. In backlogging systems and lost-sales models with zero lead time, our algorithms adapt to unknown demand changes while matching, up to logarithmic factors, the rates known for the corresponding stationary learning problems. In lost-sales systems with positive lead times, the combination of demand censoring and delayed replenishment restricts counterfactual policy evaluation and leads to weaker regret guarantees. We complement the theoretical analysis with simulation results showing that our methods significantly outperform existing non-oracle benchmarks.

arXiv

Beyond the Dirac Delta: Mitigating Diversity Collapse in Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Versatile Image Generation

Jinmei Liu, Haoru Li, Zhenhong Sun, Chaofeng Chen, Yatao Bian, Bo Wang, Daoyi Dong, Chunlin Chen, Zhi Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for fine-tuning large-scale generative models, such as diffusion and flow models, to align with complex human preferences and user-specified tasks. A fundamental limitation remains \textit{the curse of diversity collapse}, where the objective formulation and optimization landscape inherently collapse the policy to a Dirac delta distribution. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{DRIFT} (\textbf{D}ive\textbf{R}sity-\textbf{I}ncentivized Reinforcement \textbf{F}ine-\textbf{T}uning for Versatile Image Generation), an innovative framework that systematically incentivizes output diversity throughout the on-policy fine-tuning process, reconciling strong task alignment with high generation diversity to enhance versatility essential for applications that demand diverse candidate generations. We approach the problem across three representative perspectives: i) \textbf{sampling} a reward-concentrated subset that filters out reward outliers to prevent premature collapse; ii) \textbf{prompting} with stochastic variations to expand the conditioning space, and iii) \textbf{optimization} of the intra-group diversity with a potential-based reward shaping mechanism. Experimental results show that DRIFT achieves superior Pareto dominance regarding task alignment and generation diversity, yielding a $ 9.08\%\!\sim\! 43.46\%$ increase in diversity at equivalent alignment levels and a $ 59.65\% \!\sim\! 65.86\%$ increase in alignment at equivalent levels of diversity.

arXiv

HERO: Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning Optimization for Radiology Report Generation via Reason-then-Summarize

Kun Zhao, Guodong Liu, Hui Ji, Siyuan Dai, pan wang, Jifeng Song, Chenghua Lin, Liang Zhan, Haoteng Tang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have substantially advanced Radiology Report Generation (RRG), yet aligning them through reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging due to heterogeneous medical supervision. Vanilla Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) assigns uniform credit across the entire generation, leading to segment interference, token dilution, and evidence--diagnosis decoupling, which exacerbates clinical hallucinations. We propose HERO (Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning Optimization), a factorized policy optimization framework that aligns heterogeneous supervision with three optimization granularities. HERO separately optimizes reasoning, diagnosis, and evidence grounding through complementary segment-, token-, and completion-level optimization with a heterogeneous reward formulation covering diagnostic accuracy, reasoning quality, and think--answer consistency. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray show that HERO outperforms strong supervised and reinforcement learning baselines, achieving state-of-the-art clinical efficacy while producing more evidence-grounded and think--answer-consistent reports, thereby substantially mitigating clinical hallucinations.

arXiv

A Mechanistic Analysis of Transformers for Dynamical Systems

Gregory Duthé, Nikolaos Evangelou, Wei Liu, Ioannis G. Kevrekidis, Eleni Chatzi

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models, which benefit from well-established theoretical foundations, Transformer architectures are typically treated as black boxes. This gap becomes particularly relevant as attention-based models are considered for general-purpose or zero-shot forecasting across diverse dynamical regimes. In this work, we do not propose a new forecasting model, but instead investigate the representational capabilities and limitations of single-layer Transformers when applied to dynamical data. Building on a dynamical systems perspective, we interpret causal self-attention as a linear, history-dependent recurrence and analyze how it processes temporal information. Through a series of linear and nonlinear case studies, we identify distinct operational regimes. For linear systems, we show that in the single-head attention-only setting, the convexity constraint imposed by softmax attention restricts the class of autoregressive operators that can be represented, leading to oversmoothing when the target dynamics require mixed-sign lag coefficients. For nonlinear systems under partial observability, attention instead acts as an adaptive delay-embedding mechanism, enabling effective state reconstruction when sufficient temporal context and latent dimensionality are available. These results help bridge empirical observations with classical dynamical systems theory, providing insight into when and why Transformers succeed or fail as models of dynamical systems.

arXiv

Fundamentals of quantum Boltzmann machine learning with visible and hidden units

Mark M. Wilde

One of the primary applications of classical Boltzmann machines is generative modeling, wherein the goal is to tune the parameters of a model distribution so that it closely approximates a target distribution. Training relies on estimating the gradient of the relative entropy between the target and model distributions, a task that is well understood when the classical Boltzmann machine has both visible and hidden units. For some years now, it has been an obstacle to generalize this finding to quantum state learning with quantum Boltzmann machines that have both visible and hidden units. In this paper, I derive an analytical expression for the gradient of the quantum relative entropy between a target quantum state and the reduced state of the visible units of a quantum Boltzmann machine. Crucially, this expression is amenable to estimation on a quantum computer, as it involves modular-flow-generated unitary rotations reminiscent of those appearing in my prior work on rotated Petz recovery maps. This leads to a quantum algorithm for gradient estimation in this setting. I then specialize the setting to quantum visible units and classical hidden units, and vice versa; I also provide analytical expressions for the gradients, along with quantum algorithms for estimating them. Finally, I replace the quantum relative entropy objective function with the Petz-Tsallis relative entropy; here I develop an analytical expression for the gradient and sketch a quantum algorithm for estimating it, as an application of an independent derivation of a formula for the derivative of the matrix power function, which also involves modular-flow-generated unitary rotations. Ultimately, this paper demarcates progress in training quantum Boltzmann machines with visible and hidden units for generative modeling and quantum state learning.

arXiv

Galaxy Phase-Space and Field-Level Cosmology: The Strength of Semi-Analytic Models

Natalí S. M. de Santi, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Pablo Araya-Araya, Gabriella De Lucia, Fabio Fontanot, Lucia A. Perez, Manuel Arnés-Curto, Violeta Gonzalez-Perez, Ángel Chandro-Gómez, Rachel S. Somerville, Tiago Castro

Semi-analytic models are a widely used approach to simulate galaxy properties within a cosmological framework, relying on simplified yet physically motivated prescriptions. They have also proven to be an efficient alternative for generating accurate galaxy catalogs, offering a faster and less computationally expensive option compared to full hydrodynamical simulations. In this paper, we demonstrate that using only galaxy $3$D positions and radial velocities, we can train a graph neural network coupled to a moment neural network to obtain a robust machine learning based model capable of estimating the matter density parameters, $Ω_{\rm m}$, with a precision of approximately 10%. The network is trained on ($25 h^{-1}$Mpc)$^3$ volumes of galaxy catalogs from L-Galaxies and can successfully extrapolate its predictions to other semi-analytic models (GAEA, SC-SAM, and Shark) and, more remarkably, to hydrodynamical simulations (Astrid, SIMBA, IllustrisTNG, and SWIFT-EAGLE). Our results show that the network is robust to variations in astrophysical and subgrid physics, cosmological and astrophysical parameters, and the different halo-profile treatments used across simulations. This suggests that the physical relationships encoded in the phase-space of semi-analytic models are largely independent of their specific physical prescriptions, reinforcing their potential as tools for the generation of realistic mock catalogs for cosmological parameter inference.

arXiv

Interpreting GFlowNets for Drug Discovery: What probes can and cannot show

Amirtha Varshini A S, Duminda S. Ranasinghe, Hok Hei Tam

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) construct molecules through sequential decisions, but their internal policies remain opaque, limiting adoption in drug discovery, where chemists need interpretable rationales for proposed structures. We present a control-validated interpretability study of SynFlowNet, a synthesis-aware GFlowNet trained with a drug-likeness (QED) reward. Our framework combines gradient saliency and counterfactual edits, an undercomplete factor analysis, and an overcomplete BatchTopK sparse autoencoder, evaluated with shuffled-label controls, RDKit-descriptor baselines, a scaffold-disjoint split, cross-seed stability, and an architecture-matched untrained network. These controls materially change the interpretation. Physicochemical properties and functional groups are highly decodable from SynFlowNet embeddings, but an untrained network with the same architecture performs essentially as well as the trained policy (drug-likeness within 0.005 and marginally better molecular-size decoding). Thus, this decodability reflects graph architecture and atom featurization rather than representations acquired through policy training. The surviving conclusions are narrower: the overcomplete autoencoder reconstructs embeddings better than a matched undercomplete baseline at comparable sparsity; chemically enriched substructure detectors, including per-halogen and boron features, emerge in individual runs, although only a small subset of dictionary directions is stable across seeds; and zeroing individual features produces property-specific effects on probe decoding. Beyond SynFlowNet, this study provides a reusable control protocol for molecular-model interpretability, separating learned structure from signals supplied by architecture and input representation. High probe scores alone should not be treated as evidence of learned chemistry.

arXiv

DeepThinkVLA: Enhancing Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language-Action Models

Cheng Yin, Yankai Lin, Wang Xu, Sikyuen Tam, Xiangrui Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Zhouping Yin

Does Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning genuinely improve Vision Language Action (VLA) models, or does it merely add overhead? Existing CoT-VLA systems report limited and inconsistent gains, yet no prior work has rigorously diagnosed when and why CoT helps robots act. Through systematic experiments, we identify two necessary conditions that must be jointly satisfied for CoT to be effective in VLA: (1) Decoding Alignment: CoT and actions must be generated with modality-appropriate mechanisms; forcing both through a single autoregressive decoder is not merely suboptimal but actively harmful, degrading performance by 4.2 percentage points; (2) Causal Alignment: CoT must be causally linked to task success via outcome-based optimization; without it, supervised CoT is indistinguishable from no reasoning at all under action-execution-sensitive dynamics shift, exhibiting a 32.0 pp performance drop nearly identical to the 31.6 pp drop of a reasoning-free baseline. Guided by these findings, we build DeepThinkVLA: a hybrid-attention decoder satisfies Condition 1 by pairing causal attention for language with bidirectional attention for parallel action decoding, while a two-stage SFT-then-RL pipeline satisfies Condition 2 by aligning the full reasoning: action chain with sparse task-success rewards. DeepThinkVLA achieves 97.0\% success on LIBERO, 79.0\% robustness on LIBERO-Plus (vs. 61.6\% for $π_0$-FAST), and 59.3\% success on RoboTwin 2.0, exceeding the strongest baseline by 21.7 points. Furthermore, real-robot experiments provide preliminary evidence for the physical applicability of our CoT data construction and hybrid architecture. Our codes are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/DeepThinkVLA.

arXiv

Convergence and Stability Analysis of Self-Consuming Generative Models with Heterogeneous Human Curation

Hongru Zhao, Jinwen Fu, Tuan Pham

Self-consuming generative models have received significant attention over the last few years. In this paper, we study a self-consuming generative model with heterogeneous preferences that is a generalization of the model in Ferbach et al. (2024). The model is retrained round by round using real data and its previous-round synthetic outputs. The asymptotic behavior of the retraining dynamics is investigated across four regimes using different techniques including the nonlinear Perron--Frobenius theory. Our analyses improve upon that of Ferbach et al. (2024) and provide convergence results in settings where the well-known Banach contraction mapping arguments do not apply. Stability and non-stability results regarding the retraining dynamics are also given.

arXiv

Group-Equivariant Diffusion Models for Lattice Field Theory

Octavio Vega, Javad Komijani, Aida El-Khadra, Marina Marinkovic

Near the critical point, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations of lattice quantum field theories (LQFT) become increasingly inefficient due to critical slowing down. In this work, we investigate score-based symmetry-preserving diffusion models as an alternative strategy to sample two-dimensional $ϕ^4$ and ${\rm U}(1)$ lattice field theories. We develop score networks that are equivariant to a range of group transformations, including global $\mathbb{Z}_2$ reflections, local ${\rm U}(1)$ rotations, and periodic translations $\mathbb{T}$. The score networks are trained using an augmented training scheme, which significantly improves sample quality in the simulated field theories. We also demonstrate empirically that our symmetry-aware models outperform generic score networks in sample quality, expressivity, and effective sample size.

arXiv

Model Inversion meets Cryptographic Fuzzy Extractors

Mallika Prabhakar, Louise Xu, Prateek Saxena

Model inversion attacks pose an open challenge to privacy-sensitive applications that use machine learning (ML) models. For example, face authentication systems use modern ML models to compute embedding vectors from face images of the enrolled users and store them. If leaked, inversion attacks can accurately reconstruct user faces from the leaked vectors. A fuzzy extractor (FE) is a cryptographic primitive with properties that can help defend against model inversion, offering attack-agnostic security without requiring any re-training of the ML model it protects. To date, no systematic cryptanalysis of existing FE schemes that tolerate $\ell_2$ noise, as needed in modern ML-based face recognition systems, has been conducted. We perform the first in-depth security analysis of existing $\ell_2$-FE schemes showing that they offer weak security. We also show end-to-end inversion attacks that achieve high success rates in recovering original faces that are meant to be protected by FE schemes. We then offer a simple but new candidate scheme and prove its security formally. Our construction offers the first design point that offers practical runtime, stronger security, and usable accuracy for use in commodity ML-based face authentication.

Keep browsing

More papers from top AI conferences

30+ top conferences, by conference, year, and topic.