MMCert: Provable Defense against Adversarial Attacks to Multi-modal Models

Yanting Wang, Hongye Fu, Wei Zou, Jinyuan Jia; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 24655-24664

Different from a unimodal model whose input is from a single modality the input (called multi-modal input) of a multi-modal model is from multiple modalities such as image 3D points audio text etc. Similar to unimodal models many existing studies show that a multi-modal model is also vulnerable to adversarial perturbation where an attacker could add small perturbation to all modalities of a multi-modal input such that the multi-modal model makes incorrect predictions for it. Existing certified defenses are mostly designed for unimodal models which achieve sub-optimal certified robustness guarantees when extended to multi-modal models as shown in our experimental results. In our work we propose MMCert the first certified defense against adversarial attacks to a multi-modal model. We derive a lower bound on the performance of our MMCert under arbitrary adversarial attacks with bounded perturbations to both modalities (e.g. in the context of auto-driving we bound the number of changed pixels in both RGB image and depth image). We evaluate our MMCert using two benchmark datasets: one for the multi-modal road segmentation task and the other for the multi-modal emotion recognition task. Moreover we compare our MMCert with a state-of-the-art certified defense extended from unimodal models. Our experimental results show that our MMCert outperforms the baseline.