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Poster

The Adversarial Consistency of Surrogate Risks for Binary Classification

Natalie Frank · Jonathan Niles-Weed

Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 (level 1) #712

Abstract: We study the consistency of surrogate risks for robust binary classification.It is common to learn robust classifiers by adversarial training, which seeks to minimize the expected $0$-$1$ loss when each example can be maliciously corrupted within a small ball.We give a simple and complete characterization of the set of surrogate loss functions that are \emph{consistent}, i.e., that can replace the $0$-$1$ loss without affecting the minimizing sequences of the original adversarial risk, for any data distribution.We also prove a quantitative version of adversarial consistency for the $\rho$-margin loss.Our results reveal that the class of adversarially consistent surrogates is substantially smaller than in the standard setting, where many common surrogates are known to be consistent.

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