# LaFA: Latent Feature Attacks on Non-negative Matrix Factorization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03909 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03909/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [Wild Patterns: Ten Years After the Rise of Adversarial Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03141/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05644/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Robustness in Unsupervised Machine Learning: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00687/) (2023)
- [Adversarially-Trained Nonnegative Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04757/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As Machine Learning (ML) applications rapidly grow, concerns about adversarial attacks compromising their reliability have gained significant attention. One unsupervised ML method known for its resilience to such attacks is Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), an algorithm that decomposes input data into lower-dimensional latent features. However, the introduction of powerful computational tools such as Pytorch enables the computation of gradients of the latent features with respect to the original data, raising concerns about NMF's reliability. Interestingly, naively deriving the adversarial loss for NMF as in the case of ML would result in the reconstruction loss, which can be shown theoretically to be an ineffective attacking objective. In this work, we introduce a novel class of attacks in NMF termed Latent Feature Attacks (LaFA), which aim to manipulate the latent features produced by the NMF process. Our method utilizes the Feature Error (FE) loss directly on the latent features. By employing FE loss, we generate perturbations in the original data that significantly affect the extracted latent features, revealing vulnerabilities akin to those found in other ML techniques. To handle large peak-memory overhead from gradient back-propagation in FE attacks, we develop a method based on implicit differentiation which enables their scaling to larger datasets. We validate NMF vulnerabilities and FE attacks effectiveness through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data.