Extracting Unlearned Information from LLMs with Activation Steering

An unintended consequence of the vast pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the verbatim memorization of fragments of their training data, which may contain sensitive or copyrighted information. In recent years, unlearning has emerged as a solution to effectively remove sensitive knowledge from models after training. Yet, recent work has shown that supposedly deleted information can still be extracted by malicious actors through various attacks. Still, current attacks retrieve sets of possible candidate generations and are unable to pinpoint the output that contains the actual target information. We propose activation steering as a method for exact information retrieval from unlearned LLMs. We introduce a novel approach to generating steering vectors, named Anonymized Activation Steering. Additionally, we develop a simple word frequency method to pinpoint the correct answer among a set of candidates when retrieving unlearned information. Our evaluation across multiple unlearning techniques and datasets demonstrates that activation steering successfully recovers general knowledge (e.g., widely known fictional characters) while revealing limitations in retrieving specific information (e.g., details about non-public individuals). Overall, our results demonstrate that exact information retrieval from unlearned models is possible, highlighting a severe vulnerability of current unlearning techniques.

Unlocking Point Processes through Point Set Diffusion

Point processes model the distribution of random point sets in mathematical spaces, such as spatial and temporal domains, with applications in fields like seismology, neuroscience, and economics. Existing statistical and machine learning models for point processes are predominantly constrained by their reliance on the characteristic intensity function, introducing an inherent trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce Point Set Diffusion, a diffusion-based latent variable model that can represent arbitrary point processes on general metric spaces without relying on the intensity function. By directly learning to stochastically interpolate between noise and data point sets, our approach enables efficient, parallel sampling and flexible generation for complex conditional tasks defined on the metric space. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that Point Set Diffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in unconditional and conditional generation of spatial and spatiotemporal point processes while providing up to orders of magnitude faster sampling than autoregressive baselines.

Graph Neural Networks for Edge Signals: Orientation Equivariance and Invariance

Many applications in traffic, civil engineering, or electrical engineering revolve around edge-level signals. Such signals can be categorized as inherently directed, for example, the water flow in a pipe network, and undirected, like the diameter of a pipe. Topological methods model edge signals with inherent direction by representing them relative to a so-called orientation assigned to each edge. These approaches can neither model undirected edge signals nor distinguish if an edge itself is directed or undirected. We address these shortcomings by (i) revising the notion of orientation equivariance to enable edge direction-aware topological models, (ii) proposing orientation invariance as an additional requirement to describe signals without inherent direction, and (iii) developing EIGN, an architecture composed of novel direction-aware edge-level graph shift operators, that provably fulfills the aforementioned desiderata. It is the first general-purpose topological GNN for edge-level signals that can model directed and undirected signals while distinguishing between directed and undirected edges. A comprehensive evaluation shows that EIGN outperforms prior work in edge-level tasks, for example, improving in RMSE on flow simulation tasks by up to 43.5%.

Provably Reliable Conformal Prediction Sets in the Presence of Data Poisoning

Conformal prediction provides model-agnostic and distribution-free uncertainty quantification through prediction sets that are guaranteed to include the ground truth with any user-specified probability. Yet, conformal prediction is not reliable under poisoning attacks where adversaries manipulate both training and calibration data, which can significantly alter prediction sets in practice. As a solution, we propose reliable prediction sets (RPS): the first efficient method for constructing conformal prediction sets with provable reliability guarantees under poisoning. To ensure reliability under training poisoning, we introduce smoothed score functions that reliably aggregate predictions of classifiers trained on distinct partitions of the training data. To ensure reliability under calibration poisoning, we construct multiple prediction sets, each calibrated on distinct subsets of the calibration data. We then aggregate them into a majority prediction set, which includes a class only if it appears in a majority of the individual sets. Both proposed aggregations mitigate the influence of datapoints in the training and calibration data on the final prediction set. We experimentally validate our approach on image classification tasks, achieving strong reliability while maintaining utility and preserving coverage on clean data. Overall, our approach represents an important step towards more trustworthy uncertainty quantification in the presence of data poisoning.

Learning Equivariant Non-Local Electron Density Functionals

The accuracy of density functional theory hinges on the approximation of non-local contributions to the exchange-correlation (XC) functional. To date, machine-learned and human-designed approximations suffer from insufficient accuracy, limited scalability, or dependence on costly reference data. To address these issues, we introduce Equivariant Graph Exchange Correlation (EG-XC), a novel non-local XC functional based on equivariant graph neural networks. EG-XC combines semi-local functionals with a non-local feature density parametrized by an equivariant nuclei-centered point cloud representation of the electron density to capture long-range interactions. By differentiating through a self-consistent field solver, we train EG-XC requiring only energy targets. In our empirical evaluation, we find EG-XC to accurately reconstruct `gold-standard' CCSD(T) energies on MD17. On out-of-distribution conformations of 3BPA, EG-XC reduces the relative MAE by 35% to 50%. Remarkably, EG-XC excels in data efficiency and molecular size extrapolation on QM9, matching force fields trained on 5 times more and larger molecules. On identical training sets, EG-XC yields on average 51% lower MAEs.

A Probabilistic Perspective on Unlearning and Alignment for Large Language Models

Comprehensive evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is an open research problem. Existing evaluations rely on deterministic point estimates generated via greedy decoding. However, we find that deterministic evaluations fail to capture the whole output distribution of a model, yielding inaccurate estimations of model capabilities. This is particularly problematic in critical contexts such as unlearning and alignment, where precise model evaluations are crucial. To remedy this, we introduce the first formal probabilistic evaluation framework in LLMs. Namely, we derive novel metrics with high-probability guarantees concerning the output distribution of a model. Our metrics are application-independent and allow practitioners to make more reliable estimates about model capabilities before deployment. Through a case study focused on unlearning, we reveal that deterministic evaluations falsely indicate successful unlearning, whereas our probabilistic evaluations demonstrate that most if not all of the supposedly unlearned information remains accessible in these models. Additionally, we propose a novel unlearning loss based on entropy optimization and adaptive temperature scaling, which significantly improves unlearning in probabilistic settings on recent benchmarks. Our proposed shift from point estimates to probabilistic evaluations of output distributions represents an important step toward comprehensive evaluations of LLMs. https://github.com/yascho/probabilistic-unlearning

Flow Matching with Gaussian Process Priors for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Recent advancements in generative modeling, particularly diffusion models, have opened new directions for time series modeling, achieving state-of-the-art performance in forecasting and synthesis. However, the reliance of diffusion-based models on a simple, fixed prior complicates the generative process since the data and prior distributions differ significantly. We introduce TSFlow, a conditional flow matching (CFM) model for time series that simplifies the generative problem by combining Gaussian processes, optimal transport paths, and data-dependent prior distributions. By incorporating (conditional) Gaussian processes, TSFlow aligns the prior distribution more closely with the temporal structure of the data, enhancing both unconditional and conditional generation. Furthermore, we propose conditional prior sampling to enable probabilistic forecasting with an unconditionally trained model. In our experimental evaluation on eight real-world datasets, we demonstrate the generative capabilities of TSFlow, producing high-quality unconditional samples. Finally, we show that both conditionally and unconditionally trained models achieve competitive results in forecasting benchmarks, surpassing other methods on 6 out of 8 datasets.

Certifiably Robust Encoding Schemes

Quantum machine learning uses principles from quantum mechanics to process data, offering potential advances in speed and performance. However, previous work has shown that these models are susceptible to attacks that manipulate input data or exploit noise in quantum circuits. Following this, various studies have explored the robustness of these models. These works focus on the robustness certification of manipulations of the quantum states. We extend this line of research by investigating the robustness against perturbations in the classical data for a general class of data encoding schemes. We show that for such schemes, the addition of suitable noise channels is equivalent to evaluating the mean value of the noiseless classifier at the smoothed data, akin to Randomized Smoothing from classical machine learning. Using our general framework, we show that suitable additions of phase-damping noise channels improve empirical and provable robustness for the considered class of encoding schemes.

Discrete Randomized Smoothing Meets Quantum Computing

Breakthroughs in machine learning (ML) and advances in quantum computing (QC) drive the interdisciplinary field of quantum machine learning to new levels. However, due to the susceptibility of ML models to adversarial attacks, practical use raises safety-critical concerns. Existing Randomized Smoothing (RS) certification methods for classical machine learning models are computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose the combination of QC and the concept of discrete randomized smoothing to speed up the stochastic certification of ML models for discrete data. We show how to encode all the perturbations of the input binary data in superposition and use Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) to obtain a quadratic reduction in the number of calls to the model that are required compared to traditional randomized smoothing techniques. In addition, we propose a new binary threat model to allow for an extensive evaluation of our approach on images, graphs, and text.

Relaxing Graph Transformers for Adversarial Attacks

Existing studies have shown that Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Even though Graph Transformers (GTs) surpassed Message-Passing GNNs on several benchmarks, their adversarial robustness properties are unexplored. However, attacking GTs is challenging due to their Positional Encodings (PEs) and special attention mechanisms which can be difficult to differentiate. We overcome these challenges by targeting three representative architectures based on (1) random-walk PEs, (2) pair-wise-shortest-path PEs, and (3) spectral PEs - and propose the first adaptive attacks for GTs. We leverage our attacks to evaluate robustness to (a) structure perturbations on node classification; and (b) node injection attacks for (fake-news) graph classification. Our evaluation reveals that they can be catastrophically fragile and underlines our work's importance and the necessity for adaptive attacks.