SINAI: Selective Injection of Noise for Adversarial Robustness with Improved Efficiency

Zhenyu Liu, Garrett Gagnon, Swagath Venkataramani, Liu Liu

Keywords: Adversarial Robustness, Efficient Neural Networks, Hardware and Software Co-design

TL;DR: We introduce a method of injecting noise into non-essential neurons, which is specifically designed to enhance both adversarial robustness and execution efficiency simultaneously.

Abstract:

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized a wide range of industries, from healthcare and finance to automotive, by offering unparalleled capabilities in data analysis and decision-making. Despite their transforming impact, DNNs face two critical challenges: the vulnerability to adversarial attacks and the increasing computational costs associated with more complex and larger models. In this paper, we introduce an effective method designed to simultaneously enhance adversarial robustness and execution efficiency. Unlike prior studies that enhance robustness via uniformly injecting noise, we introduce a non-uniform noise injection algorithm, strategically applied at each DNN layer to disrupt adversarial perturbations introduced in attacks. By employing approximation techniques, our approach identifies and protects essential neurons while strategically introducing noise into non-essential neurons. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully enhances both robustness and efficiency across several attack scenarios, model architectures, and datasets.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 5125