Brandon Tran

Logan Engstrom, Brandon Tran, Dimitris Tsipras et al.

The study of adversarial robustness has so far largely focused on perturbations bound in p-norms. However, state-of-the-art models turn out to be also vulnerable to other, more natural classes of perturbations such as translations and rotations. In this work, we thoroughly investigate the vulnerability of neural network--based classifiers to rotations and translations. While data augmentation offers relatively small robustness, we use ideas from robust optimization and test-time input aggregation to significantly improve robustness. Finally we find that, in contrast to the p-norm case, first-order methods cannot reliably find worst-case perturbations. This highlights spatial robustness as a fundamentally different setting requiring additional study. Code available at https://github.com/MadryLab/adversarial_spatial and https://github.com/MadryLab/spatial-pytorch.

Shibani Santurkar, Dimitris Tsipras, Brandon Tran et al.

We show that the basic classification framework alone can be used to tackle some of the most challenging tasks in image synthesis. In contrast to other state-of-the-art approaches, the toolkit we develop is rather minimal: it uses a single, off-the-shelf classifier for all these tasks. The crux of our approach is that we train this classifier to be adversarially robust. It turns out that adversarial robustness is precisely what we need to directly manipulate salient features of the input. Overall, our findings demonstrate the utility of robustness in the broader machine learning context. Code and models for our experiments can be found at https://git.io/robust-apps.

Logan Engstrom, Andrew Ilyas, Shibani Santurkar et al.

An important goal in deep learning is to learn versatile, high-level feature representations of input data. However, standard networks' representations seem to possess shortcomings that, as we illustrate, prevent them from fully realizing this goal. In this work, we show that robust optimization can be re-cast as a tool for enforcing priors on the features learned by deep neural networks. It turns out that representations learned by robust models address the aforementioned shortcomings and make significant progress towards learning a high-level encoding of inputs. In particular, these representations are approximately invertible, while allowing for direct visualization and manipulation of salient input features. More broadly, our results indicate adversarial robustness as a promising avenue for improving learned representations. Our code and models for reproducing these results is available at https://git.io/robust-reps .

Andrew Ilyas, Shibani Santurkar, Dimitris Tsipras et al.

Adversarial examples have attracted significant attention in machine learning, but the reasons for their existence and pervasiveness remain unclear. We demonstrate that adversarial examples can be directly attributed to the presence of non-robust features: features derived from patterns in the data distribution that are highly predictive, yet brittle and incomprehensible to humans. After capturing these features within a theoretical framework, we establish their widespread existence in standard datasets. Finally, we present a simple setting where we can rigorously tie the phenomena we observe in practice to a misalignment between the (human-specified) notion of robustness and the inherent geometry of the data.

Brandon Tran, Jerry Li, Aleksander Madry

A recent line of work has uncovered a new form of data poisoning: so-called \emph{backdoor} attacks. These attacks are particularly dangerous because they do not affect a network's behavior on typical, benign data. Rather, the network only deviates from its expected output when triggered by a perturbation planted by an adversary. In this paper, we identify a new property of all known backdoor attacks, which we call \emph{spectral signatures}. This property allows us to utilize tools from robust statistics to thwart the attacks. We demonstrate the efficacy of these signatures in detecting and removing poisoned examples on real image sets and state of the art neural network architectures. We believe that understanding spectral signatures is a crucial first step towards designing ML systems secure against such backdoor attacks