Revisiting the Adversarial Robustness-Accuracy Tradeoff in Robot Learning

This paper explores how to make robots more resilient to attacks that could trick their decision-making systems. It finds that while some methods improve their ability to resist such attacks, they often reduce the robots' overall performance.

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Key Takeaways
  1. 1 The supervised learning objective is to fit the function to a given dataset.
  2. 2 Fast attack-generating methods are typically used for computing the max in the training objective.
  3. 3 The TRADES algorithm optimizes a joint objective of the standard ERM term and the robustness term.
  4. 4 Modifications of the min-max objective have been studied in feedback systems.

Introduction

Adversarial attacks are well-studied vulnerabilities of deep neural networks. Adversarially altered inputs are barely distinguishable from the original input by humans.

Computer vision networks can be fooled by perturbations changing each pixel by a maximum of 4% while being barely noticeable by humans.

Adversarial robustness ensures consistent and predictable robot behavior in the presence of perturbations.

Research Question

The supervised learning objective is to fit the function to a given dataset. Robust learning methods aim to train robust networks.

Adversarial training changes the standard ERM objective to the min-max objective.

Fast attack-generating methods are typically used for computing the max in the training objective.

Methodology

The fast gradient sign method computes an attack. Adversarial training often uses the FGSM method due to its speed.

Study Design

The iterative fast gradient sign method is a generalization of the FGSM.

The C&W method parametrizes the attack vector to stay within a threshold.

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Results & Findings

Norm-bounded input perturbations change network decisions and impact practical robotics applications. Adversarial training improves test-time robustness at the cost of lower nominal accuracy.

  • Norm-bounded input perturbations change network decisions and impact practical robotics applications.
  • Adversarial training improves test-time robustness at the cost of lower nominal accuracy.
  • The advanced adversarial training algorithm yielded a robust network with 89% accuracy on CIFAR-10.
  • Standard training algorithms produce non-robust networks with accuracy above 96% on this dataset.
  • The choice between accurate but vulnerable and robust but less accurate models is the robustness-accuracy trade-off.
Important Note

A model with n parameters can fit training samples but cannot smoothly interpolate between them.

Important Note

Human adversaries were studied to improve performance in robotic object manipulation tasks.

Practical Applications

The controller maps laser range scans to 7 possible categories. Certified training methods may require different hyperparameters than adversarial training.

I. Introduction

The introduction discusses the vulnerabilities of deep neural networks to adversarial attacks and the importance of adversarial robustness in robotic applications. It emphasizes the need for robots to operate reliably in diverse environments and the risks posed by adversarial manipulations.

Ii. Background And Related Work

This section outlines the theoretical framework of neural networks, adversarial attacks, and the metrics used to measure robustness. It highlights the challenges in determining network robustness and the common norms used in adversarial attacks.

Figures Explained

Fig.1. High-level summary of our results. Adversarial training improves robustness at the cost of significantly reduced accuracy. We show that methods to counteract this decrease in accuracy are most effective when multiple approaches are combined, i.e., an overparametrized network, a vision transformer neural architecture, and advanced adversarial training procedures.
Fig.2. Test conditions of our closed-loop driving experiment using a data-driven simulation environment [48] . The training data are collected in summer and winter conditions (separated from the testing data).
Fig. 3. Number of crashes out of 100 simulation runs in each data setting (summer, winter, fall, night) with respect to varying the adversarial training budget. All models were trained in summer and winter conditions (on a different data split than the evaluations). The large CNN and the ViT model perform best under heavy adversarial training, but no adversarially trained model could handle distribution shifts, i.e., fall and night conditions.
This work was supported in parts by the AI2050 program at Schmidt Futures (Grant G-22-63172), Capgemini SE, ERC-2020-AdG 101020093, National Science Foundation (NSF), and JP Morgan Graduate Fellowships. We thank Christoph Lampert for inspiring this work. Research was sponsored by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the United States Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number FA8750-19-2-1000. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Air Force or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.
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Frequently Asked Questions

The supervised learning objective is to fit the function to a given dataset. Fast attack-generating methods are typically used for computing the max in the training objective.

The iterative fast gradient sign method is a generalization of the FGSM. The C&W method parametrizes the attack vector to stay within a threshold.

We evaluate five robust learning advancements in three robotic applications and find that combining approaches is most effective. Human adversaries were studied to improve performance in robotic object manipulation tasks.

The controller maps laser range scans to 7 possible categories. Certified training methods may require different hyperparameters than adversarial training.

A model with n parameters can fit training samples but cannot smoothly interpolate between them.

This paper explores how to make robots more resilient to attacks that could trick their decision-making systems. It finds that while some methods improve their ability to resist such attacks, they often reduce the robots’ overall performance.

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