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 provable defense


Denoised Smoothing: A Provable Defense for Pretrained Classifiers

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a method for provably defending any pretrained image classifier against $\ell_p$ adversarial attacks. This method, for instance, allows public vision API providers and users to seamlessly convert pretrained non-robust classification services into provably robust ones. By prepending a custom-trained denoiser to any off-the-shelf image classifier and using randomized smoothing, we effectively create a new classifier that is guaranteed to be $\ell_p$-robust to adversarial examples, without modifying the pretrained classifier. Our approach applies to both the white-box and the black-box settings of the pretrained classifier. We refer to this defense as denoised smoothing, and we demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experimentation on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. Finally, we use our approach to provably defend the Azure, Google, AWS, and ClarifAI image classification APIs.


Provable Defense against Backdoor Policies in Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a provable defense mechanism against backdoor policies in reinforcement learning under subspace trigger assumption. A backdoor policy is a security threat where an adversary publishes a seemingly well-behaved policy which in fact allows hidden triggers. During deployment, the adversary can modify observed states in a particular way to trigger unexpected actions and harm the agent. We assume the agent does not have the resources to re-train a good policy. Instead, our defense mechanism sanitizes the backdoor policy by projecting observed states to a `safe subspace', estimated from a small number of interactions with a clean (non-triggered) environment. Our sanitized policy achieves $\epsilon$ approximate optimality in the presence of triggers, provided the number of clean interactions is $O\left(\frac{D}{(1-\gamma)^4 \epsilon^2}\right)$ where $\gamma$ is the discounting factor and $D$ is the dimension of state space. Empirically, we show that our sanitization defense performs well on two Atari game environments.


Provable Defense against Backdoor Policies in Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a provable defense mechanism against backdoor policies in reinforcement learning under subspace trigger assumption. A backdoor policy is a security threat where an adversary publishes a seemingly well-behaved policy which in fact allows hidden triggers. During deployment, the adversary can modify observed states in a particular way to trigger unexpected actions and harm the agent. We assume the agent does not have the resources to re-train a good policy. Instead, our defense mechanism sanitizes the backdoor policy by projecting observed states to a safe subspace', estimated from a small number of interactions with a clean (non-triggered) environment.


Provable Defense against Backdoor Policies in Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a provable defense mechanism against backdoor policies in reinforcement learning under subspace trigger assumption. A backdoor policy is a security threat where an adversary publishes a seemingly well-behaved policy which in fact allows hidden triggers. During deployment, the adversary can modify observed states in a particular way to trigger unexpected actions and harm the agent. We assume the agent does not have the resources to re-train a good policy. Instead, our defense mechanism sanitizes the backdoor policy by projecting observed states to a safe subspace', estimated from a small number of interactions with a clean (non-triggered) environment.


Reviews: Scaling provable adversarial defenses

Neural Information Processing Systems

Based on the rebuttal letter, in the final version I'd suggest emphasizing the provable defense is guaranteed in probabilistic sense. Even though I agree in test time the geometric estimator is not necessary, what you indeed certified are training data, instead of test data. This is a nice piece of work and I enjoy reading it. In my opinion, this work has made important contributions in norm-bounded robustness verification by proposing a scalable and more generic toolkit for robustness certification. The autodual framework is both theoretically grounded and algorithmically efficient. However, I also have two major concerns about this work: (I) the proposed nonlinear random projection leads to an estimated (i.e., probabilistic) lower bound of the minimum distortion towards misclassification, which is a soft robustness certification and does not follow the mainstream definition of deterministic lower bound; (II) Since this method yields an estimated lower bound, it then lacks performance comparison to existing bound estimation methods.


Black-box Smoothing: A Provable Defense for Pretrained Classifiers

Salman, Hadi, Sun, Mingjie, Yang, Greg, Kapoor, Ashish, Kolter, J. Zico

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present a method for provably defending any pretrained image classifier against $\ell_p$ adversarial attacks. By prepending a custom-trained denoiser to any off-the-shelf image classifier and using randomized smoothing, we effectively create a new classifier that is guaranteed to be $\ell_p$-robust to adversarial examples, without modifying the pretrained classifier. The approach applies both to the case where we have full access to the pretrained classifier as well as the case where we only have query access. We refer to this defense as black-box smoothing, and we demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experimentation on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. Finally, we use our method to provably defend the Azure, Google, AWS, and ClarifAI image classification APIs. Our code replicating all the experiments in the paper can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/blackbox-smoothing .


A Provable Defense for Deep Residual Networks

Mirman, Matthew, Singh, Gagandeep, Vechev, Martin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a training system, which can provably defend significantly larger neural networks than previously possible, including ResNet-34 and DenseNet-100. Our approach is based on differentiable abstract interpretation and introduces two novel concepts: (i) abstract layers for fine-tuning the precision and scalability of the abstraction, (ii) a flexible domain specific language (DSL) for describing training objectives that combine abstract and concrete losses with arbitrary specifications. Our training method is implemented in the DiffAI system.


Provable defenses against adversarial examples via the convex outer adversarial polytope

Wong, Eric, Kolter, J. Zico

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a method to learn deep ReLUbased classifiers that are provably robust against normbounded adversarial perturbations on the training data. For previously unseen examples, the approach is guaranteed to detect all adversarial examples, though it may flag some non-adversarial examples as well. The basic idea is to consider a convex outer approximation of the set of activations reachable through a norm-bounded perturbation, and we develop a robust optimization procedure that minimizes the worst case loss over this outer region (via a linear program). Crucially, we show that the dual problem to this linear program can be represented itself as a deep network similar to the backpropagation network, leading to very efficient optimization approaches that produce guaranteed bounds on the robust loss. The end result is that by executing a few more forward and backward passes through a slightly modified version of the original network (though possibly with much larger batch sizes), we can learn a classifier that is provably robust to any norm-bounded adversarial attack. We illustrate the approach on a number of tasks to train classifiers with robust adversarial guarantees (e.g. for MNIST, we produce a convolutional classifier that provably has less than 5.8% test error for any adversarial attack with bounded l