Towards Fair Class-wise Robustness: Class Optimal Distribution Adversarial Training

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhi, Hongxin, Yu, Hongtao, Li, Shaome, Zhao, Xiuming, Wu, Yiteng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909451667111936
author Zhi, Hongxin
Yu, Hongtao
Li, Shaome
Zhao, Xiuming
Wu, Yiteng
author_facet Zhi, Hongxin
Yu, Hongtao
Li, Shaome
Zhao, Xiuming
Wu, Yiteng
contents Adversarial training has proven to be a highly effective method for improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. Nonetheless, it has been observed to exhibit a limitation in terms of robust fairness, characterized by a significant disparity in robustness across different classes. Recent efforts to mitigate this problem have turned to class-wise reweighted methods. However, these methods suffer from a lack of rigorous theoretical analysis and are limited in their exploration of the weight space, as they mainly rely on existing heuristic algorithms or intuition to compute weights. In addition, these methods fail to guarantee the consistency of the optimization direction due to the decoupled optimization of weights and the model parameters. They potentially lead to suboptimal weight assignments and consequently, a suboptimal model. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel min-max training framework, Class Optimal Distribution Adversarial Training (CODAT), which employs distributionally robust optimization to fully explore the class-wise weight space, thus enabling the identification of the optimal weight with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, we derive a closed-form optimal solution to the internal maximization and then get a deterministic equivalent objective function, which provides a theoretical basis for the joint optimization of weights and model parameters. Meanwhile, we propose a fairness elasticity coefficient for the evaluation of the algorithm with regard to both robustness and robust fairness. Experimental results on various datasets show that the proposed method can effectively improve the robust fairness of the model and outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Fair Class-wise Robustness: Class Optimal Distribution Adversarial Training
Zhi, Hongxin
Yu, Hongtao
Li, Shaome
Zhao, Xiuming
Wu, Yiteng
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Adversarial training has proven to be a highly effective method for improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. Nonetheless, it has been observed to exhibit a limitation in terms of robust fairness, characterized by a significant disparity in robustness across different classes. Recent efforts to mitigate this problem have turned to class-wise reweighted methods. However, these methods suffer from a lack of rigorous theoretical analysis and are limited in their exploration of the weight space, as they mainly rely on existing heuristic algorithms or intuition to compute weights. In addition, these methods fail to guarantee the consistency of the optimization direction due to the decoupled optimization of weights and the model parameters. They potentially lead to suboptimal weight assignments and consequently, a suboptimal model. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel min-max training framework, Class Optimal Distribution Adversarial Training (CODAT), which employs distributionally robust optimization to fully explore the class-wise weight space, thus enabling the identification of the optimal weight with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, we derive a closed-form optimal solution to the internal maximization and then get a deterministic equivalent objective function, which provides a theoretical basis for the joint optimization of weights and model parameters. Meanwhile, we propose a fairness elasticity coefficient for the evaluation of the algorithm with regard to both robustness and robust fairness. Experimental results on various datasets show that the proposed method can effectively improve the robust fairness of the model and outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.
title Towards Fair Class-wise Robustness: Class Optimal Distribution Adversarial Training
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04527