Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Ruihan, Sun, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14923
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916258781331456
author Zhang, Ruihan
Sun, Jun
author_facet Zhang, Ruihan
Sun, Jun
contents Adversarial examples pose a security threat to many critical systems built on neural networks. Given that deterministic robustness often comes with significantly reduced accuracy, probabilistic robustness (i.e., the probability of having the same label with a vicinity is $\ge 1-κ$) has been proposed as a promising way of achieving robustness whilst maintaining accuracy. However, existing training methods for probabilistic robustness still experience non-trivial accuracy loss. It is unclear whether there is an upper bound on the accuracy when optimising towards probabilistic robustness, and whether there is a certain relationship between $κ$ and this bound. This work studies these problems from a Bayes error perspective. We find that while Bayes uncertainty does affect probabilistic robustness, its impact is smaller than that on deterministic robustness. This reduced Bayes uncertainty allows a higher upper bound on probabilistic robust accuracy than that on deterministic robust accuracy. Further, we prove that with optimal probabilistic robustness, each probabilistically robust input is also deterministically robust in a smaller vicinity. We also show that voting within the vicinity always improves probabilistic robust accuracy and the upper bound of probabilistic robust accuracy monotonically increases as $κ$ grows. Our empirical findings also align with our results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14923
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Does Bayes Error Limit Probabilistic Robust Accuracy
Zhang, Ruihan
Sun, Jun
Machine Learning
Adversarial examples pose a security threat to many critical systems built on neural networks. Given that deterministic robustness often comes with significantly reduced accuracy, probabilistic robustness (i.e., the probability of having the same label with a vicinity is $\ge 1-κ$) has been proposed as a promising way of achieving robustness whilst maintaining accuracy. However, existing training methods for probabilistic robustness still experience non-trivial accuracy loss. It is unclear whether there is an upper bound on the accuracy when optimising towards probabilistic robustness, and whether there is a certain relationship between $κ$ and this bound. This work studies these problems from a Bayes error perspective. We find that while Bayes uncertainty does affect probabilistic robustness, its impact is smaller than that on deterministic robustness. This reduced Bayes uncertainty allows a higher upper bound on probabilistic robust accuracy than that on deterministic robust accuracy. Further, we prove that with optimal probabilistic robustness, each probabilistically robust input is also deterministically robust in a smaller vicinity. We also show that voting within the vicinity always improves probabilistic robust accuracy and the upper bound of probabilistic robust accuracy monotonically increases as $κ$ grows. Our empirical findings also align with our results.
title How Does Bayes Error Limit Probabilistic Robust Accuracy
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14923