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Poster
in
Workshop: Workshop on Machine Learning Safety

Smoothed-SGDmax: A Stability-Inspired Algorithm to Improve Adversarial Generalization

Jiancong Xiao · Jiawei Zhang · Zhiquan Luo · Asuman Ozdaglar


Abstract: Unlike standard training, deep neural networks can suffer from serious overfitting problems in adversarial settings. Recent research [40,39] suggests that adversarial training can have nonvanishing generalization error even if the sample size n goes to infinity. A natural question arises: can we eliminate the generalization error floor in adversarial training? This paper gives an affirmative answer. First, by an adaptation of information-theoretical lower bound on the complexity of solving Lipschitz-convex problems using randomized algorithms, we establish a minimax lower bound Ω(s(T)/n) given a training loss of 1/s(T) for the adversarial generalization gap, where T is the number of iterations, and s(T)+ as T+. Next, by observing that the nonvanishing generalization error of existing adversarial training algorithms comes from the non-smoothness of the adversarial loss function, we employ a smoothing technique to smooth the adversarial loss function. Based on the smoothed loss function, we design a smoothed SGDmax algorithm achieving a generalization bound O(s(T)/n), which eliminates the generalization error floor and matches the minimax lower bound. Experimentally, we show that our algorithm improves adversarial generalization on common datasets.

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