How Does Bayes Error Limit Probabilistic Robust Accuracy

Abstract: Adversarial examples pose a security threat to many critical systems built on neural networks. Given that deterministic robustness often comes with significantly reduced accuracy, probabilistic robustness (i.e., the probability of having the same label with a vicinity is $\ge 1-\kappa$) has been proposed as a promising way of achieving robustness whilst maintaining accuracy. However, existing training methods for probabilistic robustness still experience non-trivial accuracy loss. It is unclear whether there is an upper bound on the accuracy when optimising towards probabilistic robustness, and whether there is a certain relationship between $\kappa$ and this bound. This work studies these problems from a Bayes error perspective. We find that while Bayes uncertainty does affect probabilistic robustness, its impact is smaller than that on deterministic robustness. This reduced Bayes uncertainty allows a higher upper bound on probabilistic robust accuracy than that on deterministic robust accuracy. Further, we prove that with optimal probabilistic robustness, each probabilistically robust input is also deterministically robust in a smaller vicinity. We also show that voting within the vicinity always improves probabilistic robust accuracy and the upper bound of probabilistic robust accuracy monotonically increases as $\kappa$ grows. Our empirical findings also align with our results.