Shedding More Light on Robust Classifiers under the lens of Energy-based Models

By reinterpreting a robust discriminative classifier as Energy-based Model (EBM), we offer a new take on the dynamics of adversarial training (AT). Our analysis of the energy landscape during AT reveals that untargeted attacks generate adversarial images much more in-distribution (lower energy) than the original data from the point of view of the model. Conversely, we observe the opposite for targeted attacks. On the ground of our thorough analysis, we present new theoretical and practical results that show how interpreting AT energy dynamics unlocks a better understanding: (1) AT dynamic is governed by three phases and robust overfitting occurs in the third phase with a drastic divergence between natural and adversarial energies (2) by rewriting the loss of TRadeoff-inspired Adversarial DEfense via Surrogate-loss minimization (TRADES) in terms of energies, we show that TRADES implicitly alleviates overfitting by means of aligning the natural energy with the adversarial one (3) we empirically show that all recent state-of-the-art robust classifiers are smoothing the energy landscape and we reconcile a variety of studies about understanding AT and weighting the loss function under the umbrella of EBMs. Motivated by rigorous evidence, we propose Weighted Energy Adversarial Training (WEAT), a novel sample weighting scheme that yields robust accuracy matching the state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks such as CIFAR-10 and SVHN and going beyond in CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet. We further show that robust classifiers vary in the intensity and quality of their generative capabilities, and offer a simple method to push this capability, reaching a remarkable Inception Score (IS) and FID using a robust classifier without training for generative modeling. The code to reproduce our results is available at http://github.com/OmnAI-Lab/Robust-Classifiers-under-the-lens-of-EBM/ .

Exploring the Connection between Robust and Generative Models

We offer a study that connects robust discriminative classifiers trained with adversarial training (AT) with generative modeling in the form of Energy-based Models (EBM). We do so by decomposing the loss of a discriminative classifier and showing that the discriminative model is also aware of the input data density. Though a common assumption is that adversarial points leave the manifold of the input data, our study finds out that, surprisingly, untargeted adversarial points in the input space are very likely under the generative model hidden inside the discriminative classifier -- have low energy in the EBM. We present two evidence: untargeted attacks are even more likely than the natural data and their likelihood increases as the attack strength increases. This allows us to easily detect them and craft a novel attack called High-Energy PGD that fools the classifier yet has energy similar to the data set.