Seasoning Model Soups for Robustness to Adversarial and Natural Distribution Shifts

Francesco Croce, Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi, Evan Shelhamer, Sven Gowal; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 12313-12323

Adversarial training is widely used to make classifiers robust to a specific threat or adversary, such as l_p-norm bounded perturbations of a given p-norm. However, existing methods for training classifiers robust to multiple threats require knowledge of all attacks during training and remain vulnerable to unseen distribution shifts. In this work, we describe how to obtain adversarially-robust model soups (i.e., linear combinations of parameters) that smoothly trade-off robustness to different l_p-norm bounded adversaries. We demonstrate that such soups allow us to control the type and level of robustness, and can achieve robustness to all threats without jointly training on all of them. In some cases, the resulting model soups are more robust to a given l_p-norm adversary than the constituent model specialized against that same adversary. Finally, we show that adversarially-robust model soups can be a viable tool to adapt to distribution shifts from a few examples.