While batch normalization has long been argued to increase adversarial vulnerability, it is still used in state-of-the-art adversarial training models. This is likely because of easier training and increased expressiveness. At the same time, recent papers argue that adversarial examples are partly caused by fragile features caused by learning spurious correlations. In this paper, we study the impact of batch normalization on utilizing these fragile features for robustness by fine-tuning only the batch normalization layers.
RESEARCH Fragile Features, Batch Normalization and Adversarial Training Outline Abstract Paper Poster News & Updates This is work led by Nils Walter. Quick links: Paper | Poster Abstract Modern deep learning architecture utilize batch normalization (BN) to stabilize training and improve accuracy. It has been shown that the BN layers alone are surprisingly expressive. In […]
Improving corruption and adversarial robustness by enhancing weak sub-networks.
The code for my ICCV’21 paper relating adversarial robustness to flatness in the (robust) loss landscape is now available on GitHub. The repository includes implementations of various adversarial attacks, adversarial training variants and “attacks” on model weights in order to measure robust flatness.
In October, I had the pleasure to present my recent work on adversarial robustness and flat minima at the math machine learning seminar of MPI MiS and UCLA organized by Guido Montúfar. The talk covers several aspects of my PhD research on adversarial robustness and robustness in terms of the model weights. This article shares abstract and recording of the talk.
In October this year, my work on relating adversarially robust generalization to flat minima in the (robust) loss surface with respect to weight perturbations was presented at ICCV’21. As oral presentation at ICCV’21, I recorded a 12 minute talk highlighting the main insights how (robust) flatness can avoid robust overfitting of adversarial training and improve robustness against adversarial examples. In this article, I want to share the recording.
Random and adversarial bit error robustness of DNNs for energy-efficient and secure DNN accelerators.
Robust generalization and overfitting linked to flatness of robust loss surface in weight space.
As part of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2019, I have a talk on the research produced throughout the academic year 2019/2020. This talk covers two exciting works on robustness: robustness against various types of adversarial examples using confidence-calibrated adversarial training (CCAT) and robustness against bit errors in the model’s quantized weights. The latter can be shown to be important to reduce the energy-consumption of accelerators for neural networks. In this article, I want to share the slides corresponding to the talk.
In June this year, my work on bit error robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) was recognized as outstanding paper at the CVPR’21 Workshop on Adversarial Machine Learning in Real-World Computer Vision Systems and Online Challenges (AML-CV). Thus, as part of the workshop, I prepared a 15 minute talk highlighting how robustness against bit errors in DNN weights can improve the energy-efficiency of DNN accelerators. In this article, I want to share the recording.