Robust Convolution Neural ODEs via Contractivity-promoting regularization

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zakwan, Muhammad, Xu, Liang, Ferrari-Trecate, Giancarlo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zakwan, Muhammad
Xu, Liang
Ferrari-Trecate, Giancarlo
author_facet Zakwan, Muhammad
Xu, Liang
Ferrari-Trecate, Giancarlo
contents Neural networks can be fragile to input noise and adversarial attacks. In this work, we consider Convolutional Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), a family of continuous-depth neural networks represented by dynamical systems, and propose to use contraction theory to improve their robustness. For a contractive dynamical system two trajectories starting from different initial conditions converge to each other exponentially fast. Contractive Convolutional NODEs can enjoy increased robustness as slight perturbations of the features do not cause a significant change in the output. Contractivity can be induced during training by using a regularization term involving the Jacobian of the system dynamics. To reduce the computational burden, we show that it can also be promoted using carefully selected weight regularization terms for a class of NODEs with slope-restricted activation functions. The performance of the proposed regularizers is illustrated through benchmark image classification tasks on MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets, where images are corrupted by different kinds of noise and attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11432
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Convolution Neural ODEs via Contractivity-promoting regularization
Zakwan, Muhammad
Xu, Liang
Ferrari-Trecate, Giancarlo
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Systems and Control
Neural networks can be fragile to input noise and adversarial attacks. In this work, we consider Convolutional Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), a family of continuous-depth neural networks represented by dynamical systems, and propose to use contraction theory to improve their robustness. For a contractive dynamical system two trajectories starting from different initial conditions converge to each other exponentially fast. Contractive Convolutional NODEs can enjoy increased robustness as slight perturbations of the features do not cause a significant change in the output. Contractivity can be induced during training by using a regularization term involving the Jacobian of the system dynamics. To reduce the computational burden, we show that it can also be promoted using carefully selected weight regularization terms for a class of NODEs with slope-restricted activation functions. The performance of the proposed regularizers is illustrated through benchmark image classification tasks on MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets, where images are corrupted by different kinds of noise and attacks.
title Robust Convolution Neural ODEs via Contractivity-promoting regularization
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11432