How Learning Dynamics Drive Adversarially Robust Generalization?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Yuelin, Zhang, Xiao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xu, Yuelin
Zhang, Xiao
author_facet Xu, Yuelin
Zhang, Xiao
contents Despite being widely adopted as a canonical framework for learning robust models, adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting. Existing empirical measures and theoretical explorations are insufficient to provide satisfying mechanistic insights into the phenomenon. By viewing adversarial training with momentum SGD as a discrete-time dynamical system, we introduce a PAC-Bayesian analytical framework that proves time-resolved robust generalization bounds. Specifically, our framework tracks the closed-form evolution of the posterior mean and covariance under both stationary and non-stationary transient regimes, revealing their connections to the learning rate, the geometry of the loss landscape, and mini-batch stochastic gradients. By empirically approximating the statistical quantities implied by our theory, we offer a unified, mechanistic explanation for robust overfitting. We also illustrate why adversarial weight perturbation reduces the robust generalization gap by suppressing the loss curvature, but its design may be suboptimal for optimization due to over-penalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07719
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Learning Dynamics Drive Adversarially Robust Generalization?
Xu, Yuelin
Zhang, Xiao
Machine Learning
Despite being widely adopted as a canonical framework for learning robust models, adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting. Existing empirical measures and theoretical explorations are insufficient to provide satisfying mechanistic insights into the phenomenon. By viewing adversarial training with momentum SGD as a discrete-time dynamical system, we introduce a PAC-Bayesian analytical framework that proves time-resolved robust generalization bounds. Specifically, our framework tracks the closed-form evolution of the posterior mean and covariance under both stationary and non-stationary transient regimes, revealing their connections to the learning rate, the geometry of the loss landscape, and mini-batch stochastic gradients. By empirically approximating the statistical quantities implied by our theory, we offer a unified, mechanistic explanation for robust overfitting. We also illustrate why adversarial weight perturbation reduces the robust generalization gap by suppressing the loss curvature, but its design may be suboptimal for optimization due to over-penalization.
title How Learning Dynamics Drive Adversarially Robust Generalization?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07719