A PAC-Bayes Analysis of Adversarial Robustness

We propose the first general PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for adversarial robustness, that estimate, at test time, how much a model will be invariant to imperceptible perturbations in the input. Instead of deriving a worst-case analysis of the risk of a hypothesis over all the possible perturbations, we leverage the PAC-Bayesian framework to bound the averaged risk on the perturbations for majority votes (over the whole class of hypotheses). Our theoretically founded analysis has the advantage to provide general bounds (i) that are valid for any kind of attacks (i.e., the adversarial attacks), (ii) that are tight thanks to the PAC-Bayesian framework, (iii) that can be directly minimized during the learning phase to obtain a robust model on different attacks at test time. * Paul Viallard and Guillaume Vidot contributed equally to this work 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021).