Sparse DNNs with Improved Adversarial Robustness

Yiwen Guo; Chao Zhang; Changshui Zhang; Yurong Chen

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arXiv · 1810.09619

Sparse DNNs with Improved Adversarial Robustness

Yiwen Guo·Chao Zhang·Changshui Zhang·Yurong Chen

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Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are computationally/memory-intensive and vulnerable to adversarial attacks, making them prohibitive in some real-world applications. By converting dense models into sparse ones, pruning appears to be a promising solution to reducing the computation/memory cost. This paper studies classification models, especially DNN-based ones, to demonstrate that there exists intrinsic relationships between their sparsity and adversarial robustness. Our analyses reveal, both theoretically and empirically, that nonlinear DNN-based classifiers behave differently under $l_2$ attacks from some linear ones. We further demonstrate that an appropriately higher model sparsity implies better robustness of nonlinear DNNs, whereas over-sparsified models can be more difficult to resist adversarial examples.

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cs.LG cs.CR cs.CV cs.NE stat.ML

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BibTeX RIS

Yiwen Guo, Chao Zhang, Changshui Zhang, Yurong Chen. 2018-10-23. Sparse DNNs with Improved Adversarial Robustness. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09619

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