Second-Order Provable Defenses against Adversarial Attacks

A robustness certificate is the minimum distance of a given input to the decision boundary of the classifier (or its lower bound). For any input perturbations with a magnitude smaller than the certificate value, the classification output will provably remain unchanged. Exactly computing the robustness certificates for neural networks is difficult since it requires solving a non-convex optimization. In this paper, we provide computationally-efficient robustness certificates for neural networks with differentiable activation functions in two steps. First, we show that if the eigenvalues of the Hessian of the network are bounded, we can compute a robustness certificate in the $l_2$ norm efficiently using convex optimization. Second, we derive a computationally-efficient differentiable upper bound on the curvature of a deep network. We also use the curvature bound as a regularization term during the training of the network to boost its certified robustness. Putting these results together leads to our proposed Curvature-based Robustness Certificate (CRC) and Curvature-based Robust Training (CRT). Our numerical results show that CRT leads to significantly higher certified robust accuracy compared to interval-bound propagation (IBP) based training. We achieve certified robust accuracy 69.79%, 57.78% and 53.19% while IBP-based methods achieve 44.96%, 44.74% and 44.66% on 2,3 and 4 layer networks respectively on the MNIST-dataset.