AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles (e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities, and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

State-of-the-art NLP models can often be fooled by adversaries that apply seemingly innocuous label-preserving transformations (e.g., paraphrasing) to input text. The number of possible transformations scales exponentially with text length, so data augmentation cannot cover all transformations of an input. This paper considers one exponentially large family of label-preserving transformations, in which every word in the input can be replaced with a similar word. We train the first models that are provably robust to all word substitutions in this family. Our training procedure uses Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) to minimize an upper bound on the worst-case loss that any combination of word substitutions can induce. To evaluate models' robustness to these transformations, we measure accuracy on adversarially chosen word substitutions applied to test examples. Our IBP-trained models attain 75% adversarial accuracy on both sentiment analysis on IMDB and natural language inference on SNLI. In comparison, on IMDB, models trained normally and ones trained with data augmentation achieve adversarial accuracy of only 8% and 35%, respectively.

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While adversarial training can improve robust accuracy (against an adversary), it sometimes hurts standard accuracy (when there is no adversary). Previous work has studied this tradeoff between standard and robust accuracy, but only in the setting where no predictor performs well on both objectives in the infinite data limit. In this paper, we show that even when the optimal predictor with infinite data performs well on both objectives, a tradeoff can still manifest itself with finite data. Furthermore, since our construction is based on a convex learning problem, we rule out optimization concerns, thus laying bare a fundamental tension between robustness and generalization. Finally, we show that robust self-training mostly eliminates this tradeoff by leveraging unlabeled data.

We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that adversarial robustness can significantly benefit from semisupervised learning. Theoretically, we revisit the simple Gaussian model of Schmidt et al. [35] that shows a sample complexity gap between standard and robust classification. We prove that this gap does not pertain to labels: a simple semisupervised learning procedure (self-training) achieves robust accuracy using the same number of labels required for standard accuracy. Empirically, we augment CIFAR-10 with 500K unlabeled images sourced from 80 Million Tiny Images and use robust self-training to outperform state-of-the-art robust accuracies by over 5 points in (i) ∞ robustness against several strong attacks via adversarial training and (ii) certified 2 and ∞ robustness via randomized smoothing. On SVHN, adding the dataset's own extra training set with the labels removed provides gains of 4 to 10 points, within 1 point of the gain from using the extra labels as well.