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Title: Excessive Invariance Causes Adversarial Vulnerability

Paper content:
Despite their impressive performance, deep neural networks exhibit striking failures on out-of-distribution inputs.
One core idea of adversarial example research is to reveal neural network errors under such distribution shifts.
We decompose these errors into two complementary sources: sensitivity and invariance.
We show deep networks are not only too sensitive to task-irrelevant changes of their input, as is well-known from epsilon-adversarial examples, but are also too invariant to a wide range of task-relevant changes, thus making vast regions in input space vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
We show such excessive invariance occurs across various tasks and architecture types.
On MNIST and ImageNet one can manipulate the class-specific content of almost any image without changing the hidden activations.
We identify an insufficiency of the standard cross-entropy loss as a reason for these failures.
Further, we extend this objective based on an information-theoretic analysis so it encourages the model to consider all task-dependent features in its decision.
This provides the first approach tailored explicitly to overcome excessive invariance and resulting vulnerabilities.
Figure 1: All images shown cause a competitive ImageNet-trained network to output the exact same probabilities over all 1000 classes (logits shown above each image).
The leftmost image is from the ImageNet validation set; all other images are constructed such that they match the non-class related information of images taken from other classes (for details see section 2.1).
The excessive invariance revealed by this set of adversarial examples demonstrates that the logits contain only a small fraction of the information perceptually relevant to humans for discrimination between the classes.Adversarial vulnerability is one of the most iconic failure cases of modern machine learning models BID45 ) and a prime example of their weakness in out-of-distribution generalization.
It is particularly striking that under i.i.d. settings deep networks show superhuman performance on many tasks BID33 , while tiny targeted shifts of the input distribution can cause them to make unintuitive mistakes.
The reason for these failures and how they may be avoided or at least mitigated is an active research area BID41 BID20 BID11 .So
far, the study of adversarial examples has mostly been concerned with the setting of small perturbation, or -adversaries BID23 BID35 BID38 .Perturbation-based
adversarial examples are appealing because they allow to quantitatively measure notions of adversarial robustness BID9 . However, recent work
argued that the perturbation-based approach is unrealistically restrictive and called for the need of generalizing the concept of adversarial examples to the unrestricted case, including any input crafted to be misinterpreted by the learned model BID44 BID10 ). Yet, settings beyond
-robustness are hard to formalize BID19 .We argue here for an
alternative, complementary viewpoint on the problem of adversarial examples. Instead of focusing
on transformations erroneously crossing the decision-boundary of classifiers, we focus on excessive invariance as a major cause for adversarial vulnerability. To this end, we introduce
the concept of invariance-based adversarial examples and show that class-specific content of almost any input can be changed arbitrarily without changing activations of the network, as illustrated in figure 1 for ImageNet. This viewpoint opens up new
directions to analyze and control crucial aspects underlying vulnerability to unrestricted adversarial examples.The invariance perspective suggests that adversarial vulnerability is a consequence of narrow learning, yielding classifiers that rely only on few highly predictive features in their decisions. This has also been supported
by the observation that deep networks strongly rely on spectral statistical regularities BID29 , or stationary statistics BID17 to make their decisions, rather than more abstract features like shape and appearance. We hypothesize that a major
reason for this excessive invariance can be understood from an information-theoretic viewpoint of crossentropy, which maximizes a bound on the mutual information between labels and representation, giving no incentive to explain all class-dependent aspects of the input. This may be desirable in some
cases, but to achieve truly general understanding of a scene or an object, machine learning models have to learn to successfully separate essence from nuisance and subsequently generalize even under shifted input distributions.
Failures of deep networks under distribution shift and their difficulty in out-of-distribution generalization are prime examples of the limitations in current machine learning models.
The field of adversarial example research aims to close this gap from a robustness point of view.
While a lot of work has studied -adversarial examples, recent trends extend the efforts towards the unrestricted case.
However, adversarial examples with no restriction are hard to formalize beyond testing error.
We introduce a reverse view on the problem to: (1) show that a major cause for adversarial vulnerability is excessive invariance to semantically meaningful variations, (2) demonstrate that this issue persists across tasks and architectures; and (3) make the control of invariance tractable via fully-invertible networks.In summary, we demonstrated how a bijective network architecture enables us to identify large adversarial subspaces on multiple datasets like the adversarial spheres, MNIST and ImageNet.
Afterwards, we formalized the distribution shifts causing such undesirable behavior via information theory.
Using this framework, we find one of the major reasons is the insufficiency of the vanilla cross-entropy loss to learn semantic representations that capture all task-dependent variations in the input.
We extend the loss function by components that explicitly encourage a split between semantically meaningful and nuisance features.
Finally, we empirically show that this split can remove unwanted invariances by performing a set of targeted invariance-based distribution shift experiments.

assistant: text: We show deep networks are not only too sensitive to task-irrelevant changes of their input, but also too invariant to a wide range of task-relevant changes, thus making vast regions in input space vulnerable to adversarial attacks.