Cost-Sensitive Robustness against Adversarial Examples

Xiao Zhang and David Evans
Seventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
New Orleans
May 2019

Abstract

Several recent works have developed methods for training classifiers that are certifiably robust against norm-bounded adversarial perturbations. However, these methods assume that all the adversarial transformations provide equal value for adversaries, which is seldom the case in real-world applications. We advocate for cost-sensitive robustness as the criteria for measuring the classifier's performance for specific tasks. We encode the potential harm of different adversarial transformations in a cost matrix, and propose a general objective function to adapt the robust training method of Wong & Kolter (2018) to optimize for cost-sensitive robustness. Our experiments on simple MNIST and CIFAR10 models and a variety of cost matrices show that the proposed approach can produce models with substantially reduced cost-sensitive robust error, while maintaining classification accuracy.

Code

https://github.com/xiaozhanguva/Cost-Sensitive-Robustness

Paper

Pre-print: [arXiv] [OpenReview] [PDF]