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Summary of Average Certified Radius Is a Poor Metric For Randomized Smoothing, by Chenhao Sun et al.


Average Certified Radius is a Poor Metric for Randomized Smoothing

by Chenhao Sun, Yuhao Mao, Mark Niklas Müller, Martin Vechev

First submitted to arxiv on: 9 Oct 2024

Categories

  • Main: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
  • Secondary: None

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GrooveSquid.com Paper Summaries

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Summary difficulty Written by Summary
High Paper authors High Difficulty Summary
Read the original abstract here
Medium GrooveSquid.com (original content) Medium Difficulty Summary
The paper investigates the effectiveness of randomized smoothing in providing certified robustness guarantees against adversarial attacks. It highlights that the average certified radius (ACR) is a popular metric for comparing methods and tracking progress in the field, but shows that ACR is a poor metric for evaluating robustness guarantees provided by randomized smoothing. The authors theoretically prove that a trivial classifier can have arbitrarily large ACR and empirically confirm that existing training strategies improve ACR on easy samples but reduce robustness on hard ones. To strengthen their conclusion, they propose strategies to achieve state-of-the-art ACR without training for robustness on the full data distribution. Overall, the paper suggests that ACR has introduced an undesired bias to the field and its application should be discontinued when evaluating randomized smoothing.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
The paper looks at a way to make computers more secure from attacks. Right now, people are using something called “randomized smoothing” to try to keep their models safe. They’re looking at how well this works by measuring something called the average certified radius (ACR). But the authors of the paper think that ACR isn’t a good way to measure this because it can be tricked into thinking a bad model is actually good if you make it really good on easy problems, even if it’s terrible on hard ones. They show that existing ways of training these models are making them worse at handling hard problems. The authors suggest some new ways to train the models that might help.

Keywords

» Artificial intelligence  » Tracking