Abhishek Joshi

Chengzhi Mao, Lingyu Zhang, Abhishek Joshi et al.

Deep networks for computer vision are not reliable when they encounter adversarial examples. In this paper, we introduce a framework that uses the dense intrinsic constraints in natural images to robustify inference. By introducing constraints at inference time, we can shift the burden of robustness from training to the inference algorithm, thereby allowing the model to adjust dynamically to each individual image's unique and potentially novel characteristics at inference time. Among different constraints, we find that equivariance-based constraints are most effective, because they allow dense constraints in the feature space without overly constraining the representation at a fine-grained level. Our theoretical results validate the importance of having such dense constraints at inference time. Our empirical experiments show that restoring feature equivariance at inference time defends against worst-case adversarial perturbations. The method obtains improved adversarial robustness on four datasets (ImageNet, Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC, and MS-COCO) on image recognition, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks. Project page is available at equi4robust.cs.columbia.edu.

Abhishek Joshi, Sathish Chalasani, Kiran Nanjunda Iyer

Detecting Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples in real world visual applications like classification or object detection has become a necessary precondition in today's deployment of Deep Learning systems. Many techniques have been proposed, of which Energy based OOD methods have proved to be promising and achieved impressive performance. We propose semantic driven energy based method, which is an end-to-end trainable system and easy to optimize. We distinguish in-distribution samples from out-distribution samples with an energy score coupled with a representation score. We achieve it by minimizing the energy for in-distribution samples and simultaneously learn respective class representations that are closer and maximizing energy for out-distribution samples and pushing their representation further out from known class representation. Moreover, we propose a novel loss function which we call Cluster Focal Loss(CFL) that proved to be simple yet very effective in learning better class wise cluster center representations. We find that, our novel approach enhances outlier detection and achieve state-of-the-art as an energy-based model on common benchmarks. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 trained WideResNet, our model significantly reduces the relative average False Positive Rate(at True Positive Rate of 95%) by 67.2% and 57.4% respectively, compared to the existing energy based approaches. Further, we extend our framework for object detection and achieve improved performance.