论文标题
避免随机平滑的限制:一种理论分析
Towards Evading the Limits of Randomized Smoothing: A Theoretical Analysis
论文作者
论文摘要
随机平滑是针对对抗性例子的可证明防御措施的主要标准。然而,该方法最近被证明遭受了重要的信息理论局限性。在本文中,我们认为这些限制不是固有的,而仅仅是当前认证方法的副产品。我们首先表明这些证书使用的有关分类器的信息太少,尤其是对决策边界的局部曲率视而不见的。随着问题的维度的增加,这会导致严重的亚最佳鲁棒性保证。然后,我们证明从理论上可以通过收集有关分类器的更多信息来绕过此问题。更确切地说,我们表明,可以通过使用多个噪声分布来探测决策边界,以任意精度近似最佳证书。由于此过程是在认证时间而不是在测试时执行的,因此在提高证书质量的同时,自然准确性不会损失。这一结果促进了对分类器特定认证的进一步研究,并证明随机平滑仍然值得研究。尽管特定于分类器的认证可能会导致更多的计算成本,但我们也提供了一些有关如何减轻它的理论见解。
Randomized smoothing is the dominant standard for provable defenses against adversarial examples. Nevertheless, this method has recently been proven to suffer from important information theoretic limitations. In this paper, we argue that these limitations are not intrinsic, but merely a byproduct of current certification methods. We first show that these certificates use too little information about the classifier, and are in particular blind to the local curvature of the decision boundary. This leads to severely sub-optimal robustness guarantees as the dimension of the problem increases. We then show that it is theoretically possible to bypass this issue by collecting more information about the classifier. More precisely, we show that it is possible to approximate the optimal certificate with arbitrary precision, by probing the decision boundary with several noise distributions. Since this process is executed at certification time rather than at test time, it entails no loss in natural accuracy while enhancing the quality of the certificates. This result fosters further research on classifier-specific certification and demonstrates that randomized smoothing is still worth investigating. Although classifier-specific certification may induce more computational cost, we also provide some theoretical insight on how to mitigate it.