[Colloquium] 1/18: Bo Li (UIUC) - Certifiably Robust Learning via Knowledge-Enabled Logical Reasoning

[Holly Santos]

Department of Computer Science Seminar

Bo Li
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Wednesday, January 18th
3:00pm - 4:00pm
In Person: John Crerar Library 390

Title: Certifiably Robust Learning via Knowledge-Enabled Logical Reasoning

Abstract:

As intelligent systems become pervasive, safeguarding their trustworthiness is critical. Standard machine learning (ML) approaches often assume that the training and test data follow similar distributions, without taking into account the possibility of adversaries manipulating either distribution or natural distribution shifts. This can lead to severe trustworthiness issues in ML. For instance, our past work has shown that motivated adversaries can circumvent anomaly detection or other machine learning models at test-time through evasion attacks, or inject well-crafted malicious instances into training data to induce errors through poisoning attacks. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of my research on trustworthy machine learning, including robustness, privacy, generalization, and their underlying interconnections, with a focus on robustness. In particular, I will first discuss the current state of the art in certifiably robust defenses based on purely data-driven learning approaches and their limitations. I will then present our certifiably robust learning via knowledge-enabled logical reasoning approach, including a thorough analysis of its properties. I will demonstrate that it is possible to 1) certify the robustness of this end-to-end approach, which significantly improves the SOTA certified robustness, 2) prove this approach is more robust than a single ML model under mild conditions, 3) make it scalable for a variety of downstream tasks, and this approach is agnostic to the tasks, data, and attacks being used.

Bio:

Dr. Bo Li<http://boli.cs.illinois.edu> is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is the recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, AI’s 10 to Watch, NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Intel Rising Star award, Symantec Research Labs Fellowship, Rising Star Award, Research Awards from Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Intel, IBM, and eBay, and best paper awards at several top machine learning and security conferences. Her research focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of trustworthy machine learning, which is at the intersection of machine learning, security, privacy, and game theory. She has designed several scalable frameworks for trustworthy machine learning and privacy-preserving data publishing systems.Her work has been featured by major publications and media outlets such as Nature, Wired, Fortune, and New York Times.

[cid:F20A9C31-2828-4C3F-A185-F6CA05AF7ED2]

---

Holly Santos
Executive Assistant to Michael J. Franklin, Chairman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
5730 S Ellis Ave-217   Chicago, IL 60637
P: 773-834-8977
hsantos at uchicago.edu<mailto:hsantos at uchicago.edu>



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20230106/63b541da/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-1.png
Type: image/png
Size: 457070 bytes
Desc: PastedGraphic-1.png
URL: <http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20230106/63b541da/attachment-0001.png>