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Title: Rethinking Softmax Cross-Entropy Loss for Adversarial Robustness

Paper content:
Previous work shows that adversarially robust generalization requires larger sample complexity, and the same dataset, e.g., CIFAR-10, which enables good standard accuracy may not suffice to train robust models.
Since collecting new training data could be costly, we focus on better utilizing the given data by inducing the regions with high sample density in the feature space, which could lead to locally sufficient samples for robust learning.
We first formally show that the softmax cross-entropy (SCE) loss and its variants convey inappropriate supervisory signals, which encourage the learned feature points to spread over the space sparsely in training.
This inspires us to propose the Max-Mahalanobis center (MMC) loss to explicitly induce dense feature regions in order to benefit robustness.
Namely, the MMC loss encourages the model to concentrate on learning ordered and compact representations, which gather around the preset optimal centers for different classes.
We empirically demonstrate that applying the MMC loss can significantly improve robustness even under strong adaptive attacks, while keeping state-of-the-art accuracy on clean inputs with little extra computation compared to the SCE loss.
The deep neural networks (DNNs) trained by the softmax cross-entropy (SCE) loss have achieved state-of-the-art performance on various tasks (Goodfellow et al., 2016) .
However, in terms of robustness, the SCE loss is not sufficient to lead to satisfactory performance of the trained models.
It has been widely recognized that the DNNs trained by the SCE loss are vulnerable to adversarial attacks (Carlini & Wagner, 2017a; Goodfellow et al., 2015; Kurakin et al., 2017; Papernot et al., 2016) , where human imperceptible perturbations can be crafted to fool a high-performance network.
To improve adversarial robustness of classifiers, various kinds of defenses have been proposed, but many of them are quickly shown to be ineffective to the adaptive attacks, which are adapted to the specific details of the proposed defenses .
Besides, the methods on verification and training provably robust networks have been proposed (Dvijotham et al., 2018a; b; Hein & Andriushchenko, 2017; .
While these methods are exciting, the verification process is often slow and not scalable.
Among the previously proposed defenses, the adversarial training (AT) methods can achieve state-of-the-art robustness under different adversarial settings Zhang et al., 2019b) .
These methods either directly impose the AT mechanism on the SCE loss or add additional regularizers.
Although the AT methods are relatively strong, they could sacrifice accuracy on clean inputs and are computationally expensive (Xie et al., 2019) .
Due to the computational obstruction, many recent efforts have been devoted to proposing faster verification methods Xiao et al., 2019) and accelerating AT procedures (Shafahi et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019a) .
However, the problem still remains.
show that the sample complexity of robust learning can be significantly larger than that of standard learning.
Given the difficulty of training robust classifiers in practice, they further postulate that the difficulty could stem from the insufficiency of training samples in the commonly used datasets, e.g., CIFAR-10 (Krizhevsky & Hinton, 2009) .
Recent work intends to solve this problem by utilizing extra unlabeled data (Carmon et al., 2019; Stanforth et al., 2019) , while we focus on the complementary strategy to exploit the labeled data in hand more efficiently.
Note that although the samples in the input space are unchangeable, we could instead manipulate the local sample distribution, i.e., sample density in the feature space via appropriate training objectives.
Intuitively, by inducing high-density feature regions, there would be locally sufficient samples to train robust classifiers and return reliable predictions .
!""# ∈ %&, %& + ∆% (low sample density) !""# ∈ %*, %* + ∆% (high sample density) + , * !
.#/ ∈ %&, %& + ∆% (medium sample density) !.#/ ∈ %*, %* + ∆% (medium sample density)
In this paper, we formally demonstrate that applying the softmax function in training could potentially lead to unexpected supervisory signals.
To solve this problem, we propose the MMC loss to learn more structured representations and induce high-density regions in the feature space.
In our experiments, we empirically demonstrate several favorable merits of our method:
(i) Lead to reliable robustness even under strong adaptive attacks in different threat models;
(ii) Keep high performance on clean inputs comparable TO SCE;
(iii) Introduce little extra computation compared to the SCE loss;
(iv) Compatible with the existing defense mechanisms, e.g., the AT methods.
Our analyses in this paper also provide useful insights for future work on designing new objectives beyond the SCE framework.

assistant: text: Applying the softmax function in training leads to indirect and unexpected supervision on features. We propose a new training objective to explicitly induce dense feature regions for locally sufficient samples to benefit adversarial robustness.