Boosting Adversarial Robustness Using Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing

Sravanti Addepalli, Samyak Jain, Gaurang Sriramanan, R. Venkatesh Babu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2021, pp. 93-102

Advances in adversarial defenses have led to a significant improvement in the robustness of Deep Neural Networks. However, the robust accuracy of present state-of-the-art defenses is far from the requirements in critical applications such as robotics and autonomous navigation systems. Further, in practical use cases, network prediction alone might not suffice, and assignment of a confidence value for the prediction can prove crucial. In this work, we propose a generic method for introducing stochasticity in the network predictions, and utilize this for smoothing decision boundaries and rejecting low confidence predictions, thereby boosting the robustness on accepted samples. The proposed Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing based classification also results in a boost in robustness without rejection over existing adversarial training methods. Finally, we combine the proposed method with adversarial detection methods, to achieve the benefits of both approaches.