Towards Accurate and Robust Architectures via Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Yuwei Ou, Yuqi Feng, Yanan Sun

To defend deep neural networks from adversarial attacks adversarial training has been drawing increasing attention for its effectiveness. However the accuracy and robustness resulting from the adversarial training are limited by the architecture because adversarial training improves accuracy and robustness by adjusting the weight connection affiliated to the architecture. In this work we propose ARNAS to search for accurate and robust architectures for adversarial training. First we design an accurate and robust search space in which the placement of the cells and the proportional relationship of the filter numbers are carefully determined. With the design the architectures can obtain both accuracy and robustness by deploying accurate and robust structures to their sensitive positions respectively. Then we propose a differentiable multi-objective search strategy performing gradient descent towards directions that are beneficial for both natural loss and adversarial loss thus the accuracy and robustness can be guaranteed at the same time. We conduct comprehensive experiments in terms of white-box attacks black-box attacks and transferability. Experimental results show that the searched architecture has the strongest robustness with the competitive accuracy and breaks the traditional idea that NAS-based architectures cannot transfer well to complex tasks in robustness scenarios. By analyzing outstanding architectures searched we also conclude that accurate and robust neural architectures tend to deploy different structures near the input and output which has great practical significance on both hand-crafting and automatically designing of accurate and robust architectures.