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Main Authors: Haldar, Rajdeep, Xing, Yue, Song, Qifan, Lin, Guang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06921
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author Haldar, Rajdeep
Xing, Yue
Song, Qifan
Lin, Guang
author_facet Haldar, Rajdeep
Xing, Yue
Song, Qifan
Lin, Guang
contents Recent works have shown theoretically and empirically that redundant data dimensions are a source of adversarial vulnerability. However, the inverse doesn't seem to hold in practice; employing dimension-reduction techniques doesn't exhibit robustness as expected. In this work, we consider classification tasks and characterize the data distribution as a low-dimensional manifold, with high/low variance features defining the on/off manifold direction. We argue that clean training experiences poor convergence in the off-manifold direction caused by the ill-conditioning in widely used first-order optimizers like gradient descent. The poor convergence then acts as a source of adversarial vulnerability when the dataset is inseparable in the on-manifold direction. We provide theoretical results for logistic regression and a 2-layer linear network on the considered data distribution. Furthermore, we advocate using second-order methods that are immune to ill-conditioning and lead to better robustness. We perform experiments and exhibit tremendous robustness improvements in clean training through long training and the employment of second-order methods, corroborating our framework. Additionally, we find the inclusion of batch-norm layers hinders such robustness gains. We attribute this to differing implicit biases between traditional and batch-normalized neural networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_06921
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Vulnerability as a Consequence of On-Manifold Inseparibility
Haldar, Rajdeep
Xing, Yue
Song, Qifan
Lin, Guang
Machine Learning
Recent works have shown theoretically and empirically that redundant data dimensions are a source of adversarial vulnerability. However, the inverse doesn't seem to hold in practice; employing dimension-reduction techniques doesn't exhibit robustness as expected. In this work, we consider classification tasks and characterize the data distribution as a low-dimensional manifold, with high/low variance features defining the on/off manifold direction. We argue that clean training experiences poor convergence in the off-manifold direction caused by the ill-conditioning in widely used first-order optimizers like gradient descent. The poor convergence then acts as a source of adversarial vulnerability when the dataset is inseparable in the on-manifold direction. We provide theoretical results for logistic regression and a 2-layer linear network on the considered data distribution. Furthermore, we advocate using second-order methods that are immune to ill-conditioning and lead to better robustness. We perform experiments and exhibit tremendous robustness improvements in clean training through long training and the employment of second-order methods, corroborating our framework. Additionally, we find the inclusion of batch-norm layers hinders such robustness gains. We attribute this to differing implicit biases between traditional and batch-normalized neural networks.
title Adversarial Vulnerability as a Consequence of On-Manifold Inseparibility
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06921