Revisiting Image Classifier Training for Improved Certified Robust Defense against Adversarial Patches

Abstract: Certifiably robust defenses against adversarial patches for image classifiers ensure correct prediction against any changes to a constrained neighborhood of pixels. PatchCleanser arXiv:2108.09135 [cs.CV], the state-of-the-art certified defense, uses a double-masking strategy for robust classification. The success of this strategy relies heavily on the model's invariance to image pixel masking. In this paper, we take a closer look at model training schemes to improve this invariance. Instead of using Random Cutout arXiv:1708.04552v2 [cs.CV] augmentations like PatchCleanser, we introduce the notion of worst-case masking, i.e., selecting masked images which maximize classification loss. However, finding worst-case masks requires an exhaustive search, which might be prohibitively expensive to do on-the-fly during training. To solve this problem, we propose a two-round greedy masking strategy (Greedy Cutout) which finds an approximate worst-case mask location with much less compute. We show that the models trained with our Greedy Cutout improves certified robust accuracy over Random Cutout in PatchCleanser across a range of datasets and architectures. Certified robust accuracy on ImageNet with a ViT-B16-224 model increases from 58.1\% to 62.3\% against a 3\% square patch applied anywhere on the image.