Min-max optimization without gradients: Convergence and applications to black-box evasion and poisoning attacks

Sijia Liu, Songtao Lu, Xiangyi Chen, Yao Feng, Kaidi Xu, Abdullah Al-Dujaili, Mingyi Hong

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of constrained min-max optimization in a black-box setting, where the desired optimizer cannot access the gradients of the objective function but may query its values. We present a principled optimization framework, integrating a zeroth-order (ZO) gradient estimator with an alternating projected stochastic gradient descent-Ascent method, where the former only requires a small number of function queries and the later needs just one-step descent/ ascent update. We show that the proposed framework, referred to as ZO-Min-Max, has a sublinear convergence rate under mild conditions and scales gracefully with problem size. We also explore a promising connection between black-box min-max optimization and black-box evasion and poisoning attacks in adversarial machine learning (ML). Our empirical evaluations on these use cases demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its scalability to dimensions that prohibit using recent black-box solvers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
EditorsHal Daume, Aarti Singh
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
Pages6238-6249
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781713821120
StatePublished - 2020
Event37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jul 13 2020Jul 18 2020

Publication series

Name37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
VolumePartF168147-9

Conference

Conference37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/13/207/18/20

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020. All rights reserved.

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