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First published: 2018/10/30 (5 years ago)
Abstract: Recent work has shown that it is possible to train deep neural networks that are verifiably robust to norm-bounded adversarial perturbations. Most of these methods are based on minimizing an upper bound on the worst-case loss over all possible adversarial perturbations. While these techniques show promise, they remain hard to scale to larger networks. Through a comprehensive analysis, we show how a careful implementation of a simple bounding technique, interval bound propagation (IBP), can be exploited to train verifiably robust neural networks that beat the state-of-the-art in verified accuracy. While the upper bound computed by IBP can be quite weak for general networks, we demonstrate that an appropriate loss and choice of hyper-parameters allows the network to adapt such that the IBP bound is tight. This results in a fast and stable learning algorithm that outperforms more sophisticated methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. It also allows us to obtain the first verifiably robust model on a downscaled version of ImageNet.