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Adversarial Training Can Hurt Generalization (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Jun 17, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Even when one ideal predictor could handle both normal and attacked inputs, training on limited data to resist attacks can still lower accuracy on normal inputs. A simple setting rules out training difficulties, and adding unlabeled data mostly removes the drop.

Abstract

While adversarial training can improve robust accuracy (against an adversary), it sometimes hurts standard accuracy (when there is no adversary). Previous work has studied this tradeoff between standard and robust accuracy, but only in the setting where no predictor performs well on both objectives in the infinite data limit. In this paper, we show that even when the optimal predictor with infinite data performs well on both objectives, a tradeoff can still manifest itself with finite data. Furthermore, since our construction is based on a convex learning problem, we rule out optimization concerns, thus laying bare a fundamental tension between robustness and generalization. Finally, we show that robust self-training mostly eliminates this tradeoff by leveraging unlabeled data.

Aditi Raghunathan, Sang Michael Xie, Fanny Yang, John C. Duchi, Percy Liang
arXiv:1906.06032 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jun 14, 2019 · updated Aug 26, 2019
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