Robust Overfitting may be mitigated by properly learned smoothening

May 3, 2021

Speakers

About

A recent study (Rice et al., 2020) revealed overfitting to be a dominant phenomenon in adversarially robust training of deep networks, and that appropriate early-stopping of adversarial training (AT) could match the performance gains of most recent algorithmic improvements. This intriguing problem of robust overfitting motivates us to seek more remedies. As a pilot study, this paper investigates two empirical means to inject more learned smoothening during AT: one leveraging knowledge distillation and self-training to smooth the logits, the other performing stochastic weight averaging (Izmailov et al., 2018) to smooth the weights. Despite the embarrassing simplicity, the two approaches are surprisingly effective and hassle-free in mitigating robust overfitting. Experiments demonstrate that by plugging in them to AT, we can simultaneously boost the standard accuracy by 3.72%~6.68% and robust accuracy by 0.22%~2 .03%, across multiple datasets (STL-10, SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet), perturbation types ($\ell_{\infty}$ and $\ell_2$), and robustified methods (PGD, TRADES, and FSGM), establishing the new state-of-the-art bar in AT. We present systematic visualizations and analysis to dive into their possible working mechanisms. We also carefully exclude the possibility of gradient masking by evaluating our models' robustness against transfer attacks. We promise to publicly release our codes and pre-trained models.

Organizer

About ICLR 2021

The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning, but generally referred to as deep learning. ICLR is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of deep learning used in the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, gaming, and robotics.

Like the format? Trust SlidesLive to capture your next event!

Professional recording and live streaming, delivered globally.

Sharing

Recommended Videos

Presentations on similar topic, category or speaker

Interested in talks like this? Follow ICLR 2021