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arXiv · 2105.09394

Balancing Robustness and Sensitivity using Feature Contrastive Learning

Seungyeon Kim·Daniel Glasner·Srikumar Ramalingam·Cho-Jui Hsieh·Kishore Papineni·Sanjiv Kumar
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Abstract

It is generally believed that robust training of extremely large networks is critical to their success in real-world applications. However, when taken to the extreme, methods that promote robustness can hurt the model's sensitivity to rare or underrepresented patterns. In this paper, we discuss this trade-off between sensitivity and robustness to natural (non-adversarial) perturbations by introducing two notions: contextual feature utility and contextual feature sensitivity. We propose Feature Contrastive Learning (FCL) that encourages a model to be more sensitive to the features that have higher contextual utility. Empirical results demonstrate that models trained with FCL achieve a better balance of robustness and sensitivity, leading to improved generalization in the presence of noise on both vision and NLP datasets.

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Seungyeon Kim, Daniel Glasner, Srikumar Ramalingam, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Kishore Papineni, Sanjiv Kumar. 2021-05-19. Balancing Robustness and Sensitivity using Feature Contrastive Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09394

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