Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Training
This addresses a specific issue in adversarial robustness for deep neural networks, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of adversarial training introducing unintended semantic biases in adversarial examples, which harms model robustness, and proposes semantics-preserving adversarial training (SPAT) to mitigate this, achieving state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.
Adversarial training is a defense technique that improves adversarial robustness of a deep neural network (DNN) by including adversarial examples in the training data. In this paper, we identify an overlooked problem of adversarial training in that these adversarial examples often have different semantics than the original data, introducing unintended biases into the model. We hypothesize that such non-semantics-preserving (and resultingly ambiguous) adversarial data harm the robustness of the target models. To mitigate such unintended semantic changes of adversarial examples, we propose semantics-preserving adversarial training (SPAT) which encourages perturbation on the pixels that are shared among all classes when generating adversarial examples in the training stage. Experiment results show that SPAT improves adversarial robustness and achieves state-of-the-art results in CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.