Label Smoothing and Logit Squeezing: A Replacement for Adversarial Training?

Ali Shafahi, Amin Ghiasi, Furong Huang, Tom Goldstein

Abstract:

Adversarial training is one of the strongest defenses against adversarial attacks, but it requires adversarial examples to be generated for every mini-batch during optimization. The expense of producing these examples during training often precludes adversarial training from use on complex image datasets.
In this study, we explore the mechanisms by which adversarial training improves classifier robustness, and show that these mechanisms can be effectively mimicked using simple regularization methods, including label smoothing and logit squeezing.
Remarkably, using these simple regularization methods in combination with Gaussian noise injection, we are able to achieve strong adversarial robustness -- often exceeding that of adversarial training -- using no adversarial examples.

Keywords: adversarial machine learning, machine learning security

TL;DR: Achieving strong adversarial robustness comparable to adversarial training without training on adversarial examples

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/label-smoothing-and-logit-squeezing-a/code)