Catastrophic Overfitting: A Potential Blessing in Disguise

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Mengnan, Zhang, Lihe, Kong, Yuqiu, Yin, Baocai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866910347179327488
author Zhao, Mengnan
Zhang, Lihe
Kong, Yuqiu
Yin, Baocai
author_facet Zhao, Mengnan
Zhang, Lihe
Kong, Yuqiu
Yin, Baocai
contents Fast Adversarial Training (FAT) has gained increasing attention within the research community owing to its efficacy in improving adversarial robustness. Particularly noteworthy is the challenge posed by catastrophic overfitting (CO) in this field. Although existing FAT approaches have made strides in mitigating CO, the ascent of adversarial robustness occurs with a non-negligible decline in classification accuracy on clean samples. To tackle this issue, we initially employ the feature activation differences between clean and adversarial examples to analyze the underlying causes of CO. Intriguingly, our findings reveal that CO can be attributed to the feature coverage induced by a few specific pathways. By intentionally manipulating feature activation differences in these pathways with well-designed regularization terms, we can effectively mitigate and induce CO, providing further evidence for this observation. Notably, models trained stably with these terms exhibit superior performance compared to prior FAT work. On this basis, we harness CO to achieve `attack obfuscation', aiming to bolster model performance. Consequently, the models suffering from CO can attain optimal classification accuracy on both clean and adversarial data when adding random noise to inputs during evaluation. We also validate their robustness against transferred adversarial examples and the necessity of inducing CO to improve robustness. Hence, CO may not be a problem that has to be solved.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18211
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Catastrophic Overfitting: A Potential Blessing in Disguise
Zhao, Mengnan
Zhang, Lihe
Kong, Yuqiu
Yin, Baocai
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Fast Adversarial Training (FAT) has gained increasing attention within the research community owing to its efficacy in improving adversarial robustness. Particularly noteworthy is the challenge posed by catastrophic overfitting (CO) in this field. Although existing FAT approaches have made strides in mitigating CO, the ascent of adversarial robustness occurs with a non-negligible decline in classification accuracy on clean samples. To tackle this issue, we initially employ the feature activation differences between clean and adversarial examples to analyze the underlying causes of CO. Intriguingly, our findings reveal that CO can be attributed to the feature coverage induced by a few specific pathways. By intentionally manipulating feature activation differences in these pathways with well-designed regularization terms, we can effectively mitigate and induce CO, providing further evidence for this observation. Notably, models trained stably with these terms exhibit superior performance compared to prior FAT work. On this basis, we harness CO to achieve `attack obfuscation', aiming to bolster model performance. Consequently, the models suffering from CO can attain optimal classification accuracy on both clean and adversarial data when adding random noise to inputs during evaluation. We also validate their robustness against transferred adversarial examples and the necessity of inducing CO to improve robustness. Hence, CO may not be a problem that has to be solved.
title Catastrophic Overfitting: A Potential Blessing in Disguise
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18211