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Nadav Cohen

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Why Does Agentic Safety Fail to Generalize Across Tasks?

AI agents are increasingly deployed in multi-task settings, where the task to perform is specified at test time, and the agent must generalize to unseen tasks. A major concern in such settings is safety: often, an agent must not only execute unseen tasks, but do so while avoiding risks and handling ones that materialize. Empirical evidence suggests that even when the ability to execute generalizes to unseen tasks, the ability to do so safely frequently does not. This paper provides theory and experiments indicating that failures of agentic safety to generalize across tasks are not merely due to limitations of training methods, but reflect an inherent property of safety itself: the relationship between a task and its safe execution is more complex than the relationship between a task and its execution alone. Theoretically, we analyze linear-quadratic control with $H_{\infty}$-robustness, and prove that the mapping from task specification to an optimal controller has higher Lipschitz constant with safety requirements than without, yielding a Lipschitz bound of independent interest. Empirically, we demonstrate our conclusions in simulated quadcopter navigation with a neural network agent and in CRM with an LLM agent. Our findings suggest that current efforts to enhance agentic safety may be insufficient, and point to a need for fundamentally different approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

BeamsNet: A data-driven Approach Enhancing Doppler Velocity Log Measurements for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) perform various applications such as seafloor mapping and underwater structure health monitoring. Commonly, an inertial navigation system aided by a Doppler velocity log (DVL) is used to provide the vehicle's navigation solution. In such fusion, the DVL provides the velocity vector of the AUV, which determines the navigation solution's accuracy and helps estimate the navigation states. This paper proposes BeamsNet, an end-to-end deep learning framework to regress the estimated DVL velocity vector that improves the accuracy of the velocity vector estimate, and could replace the model-based approach. Two versions of BeamsNet, differing in their input to the network, are suggested. The first uses the current DVL beam measurements and inertial sensors data, while the other utilizes only DVL data, taking the current and past DVL measurements for the regression process. Both simulation and sea experiments were made to validate the proposed learning approach relative to the model-based approach. Sea experiments were made with the Snapir AUV in the Mediterranean Sea, collecting approximately four hours of DVL and inertial sensor data. Our results show that the proposed approach achieved an improvement of more than 60% in estimating the DVL velocity vector.

preprint2022arXiv

On the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent for Temporal Extrapolation

When using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) it is common practice to apply trained models to sequences longer than those seen in training. This "extrapolating" usage deviates from the traditional statistical learning setup where guarantees are provided under the assumption that train and test distributions are identical. Here we set out to understand when RNNs can extrapolate, focusing on a simple case where the data generating distribution is memoryless. We first show that even with infinite training data, there exist RNN models that interpolate perfectly (i.e., they fit the training data) yet extrapolate poorly to longer sequences. We then show that if gradient descent is used for training, learning will converge to perfect extrapolation under certain assumptions on initialization. Our results complement recent studies on the implicit bias of gradient descent, showing that it plays a key role in extrapolation when learning temporal prediction models.

preprint2022arXiv

Semantic Segmentation in Art Paintings

Semantic segmentation is a difficult task even when trained in a supervised manner on photographs. In this paper, we tackle the problem of semantic segmentation of artistic paintings, an even more challenging task because of a much larger diversity in colors, textures, and shapes and because there are no ground truth annotations available for segmentation. We propose an unsupervised method for semantic segmentation of paintings using domain adaptation. Our approach creates a training set of pseudo-paintings in specific artistic styles by using style-transfer on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, and then applies domain confusion between PASCAL VOC 2012 and real paintings. These two steps build on a new dataset we gathered called DRAM (Diverse Realism in Art Movements) composed of figurative art paintings from four movements, which are highly diverse in pattern, color, and geometry. To segment new paintings, we present a composite multi-domain adaptation method that trains on each sub-domain separately and composes their solutions during inference time. Our method provides better segmentation results not only on the specific artistic movements of DRAM, but also on other, unseen ones. We compare our approach to alternative methods and show applications of semantic segmentation in art paintings. The code and models for our approach are publicly available at: https://github.com/Nadavc220/SemanticSegmentationInArtPaintings.

preprint2016arXiv

A rotational traveling wave based levitation device - Modeling, design, and control

Described is a device acting on an acoustically levitated object by manipulating the pressure and flow of a thin layer of air such that its rotation can be precisely controlled without mechanical contact. Virtual work analysis assists in simplifying the multi-actuator control problem into a problem governed by a controllable parameter. Actuation is done with a vibrating ring capable of producing ultrasonic standing and traveling waves, creating the acoustic excitation that affects the pressure in a thin, intermediate layer of gas. A distinctive vibration pattern is required to generate the temporal and spatial pressure field of the squeezed air layer that gives rise to both acoustic levitation force and rotational torque. Described are the physical and design development stages leading to an optimized structure, all followed by verifying and dynamics-calibration experiments. Moreover, by precisely controlling the ratio of standing and traveling waves in a closed-loop, one can affect the shear forces applied by the squeezed air layer, thus creating a non-contacting manipulation mechanism. An over-actuated set-up is converted via an algebraic transformation, into a simplified single control-parameter problem. The transformation ties the standing waves ratio, and hence the rotational torque, to the amplitudes and phases of the actuators. This arrangement leads to an effective closed loop methodology that was implemented experimentally showing good performance and exhibiting rapid angular positioning.

preprint2016arXiv

Convolutional Rectifier Networks as Generalized Tensor Decompositions

Convolutional rectifier networks, i.e. convolutional neural networks with rectified linear activation and max or average pooling, are the cornerstone of modern deep learning. However, despite their wide use and success, our theoretical understanding of the expressive properties that drive these networks is partial at best. On the other hand, we have a much firmer grasp of these issues in the world of arithmetic circuits. Specifically, it is known that convolutional arithmetic circuits possess the property of "complete depth efficiency", meaning that besides a negligible set, all functions that can be implemented by a deep network of polynomial size, require exponential size in order to be implemented (or even approximated) by a shallow network. In this paper we describe a construction based on generalized tensor decompositions, that transforms convolutional arithmetic circuits into convolutional rectifier networks. We then use mathematical tools available from the world of arithmetic circuits to prove new results. First, we show that convolutional rectifier networks are universal with max pooling but not with average pooling. Second, and more importantly, we show that depth efficiency is weaker with convolutional rectifier networks than it is with convolutional arithmetic circuits. This leads us to believe that developing effective methods for training convolutional arithmetic circuits, thereby fulfilling their expressive potential, may give rise to a deep learning architecture that is provably superior to convolutional rectifier networks but has so far been overlooked by practitioners.

preprint2016arXiv

Deep SimNets

We present a deep layered architecture that generalizes convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). The architecture, called SimNets, is driven by two operators: (i) a similarity function that generalizes inner-product, and (ii) a log-mean-exp function called MEX that generalizes maximum and average. The two operators applied in succession give rise to a standard neuron but in "feature space". The feature spaces realized by SimNets depend on the choice of the similarity operator. The simplest setting, which corresponds to a convolution, realizes the feature space of the Exponential kernel, while other settings realize feature spaces of more powerful kernels (Generalized Gaussian, which includes as special cases RBF and Laplacian), or even dynamically learned feature spaces (Generalized Multiple Kernel Learning). As a result, the SimNet contains a higher abstraction level compared to a traditional ConvNet. We argue that enhanced expressiveness is important when the networks are small due to run-time constraints (such as those imposed by mobile applications). Empirical evaluation validates the superior expressiveness of SimNets, showing a significant gain in accuracy over ConvNets when computational resources at run-time are limited. We also show that in large-scale settings, where computational complexity is less of a concern, the additional capacity of SimNets can be controlled with proper regularization, yielding accuracies comparable to state of the art ConvNets.

preprint2016arXiv

On the Expressive Power of Deep Learning: A Tensor Analysis

It has long been conjectured that hypotheses spaces suitable for data that is compositional in nature, such as text or images, may be more efficiently represented with deep hierarchical networks than with shallow ones. Despite the vast empirical evidence supporting this belief, theoretical justifications to date are limited. In particular, they do not account for the locality, sharing and pooling constructs of convolutional networks, the most successful deep learning architecture to date. In this work we derive a deep network architecture based on arithmetic circuits that inherently employs locality, sharing and pooling. An equivalence between the networks and hierarchical tensor factorizations is established. We show that a shallow network corresponds to CP (rank-1) decomposition, whereas a deep network corresponds to Hierarchical Tucker decomposition. Using tools from measure theory and matrix algebra, we prove that besides a negligible set, all functions that can be implemented by a deep network of polynomial size, require exponential size in order to be realized (or even approximated) by a shallow network. Since log-space computation transforms our networks into SimNets, the result applies directly to a deep learning architecture demonstrating promising empirical performance. The construction and theory developed in this paper shed new light on various practices and ideas employed by the deep learning community.

preprint2014arXiv

SimNets: A Generalization of Convolutional Networks

We present a deep layered architecture that generalizes classical convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). The architecture, called SimNets, is driven by two operators, one being a similarity function whose family contains the convolution operator used in ConvNets, and the other is a new soft max-min-mean operator called MEX that realizes classical operators like ReLU and max pooling, but has additional capabilities that make SimNets a powerful generalization of ConvNets. Three interesting properties emerge from the architecture: (i) the basic input to hidden layer to output machinery contains as special cases kernel machines with the Exponential and Generalized Gaussian kernels, the output units being "neurons in feature space" (ii) in its general form, the basic machinery has a higher abstraction level than kernel machines, and (iii) initializing networks using unsupervised learning is natural. Experiments demonstrate the capability of achieving state of the art accuracy with networks that are an order of magnitude smaller than comparable ConvNets.