Curating Naturally Adversarial Datasets for Learning-Enabled Medical Cyber-Physical Systems

Sydney Pugh, Ivan Ruchkin, James Weimer, Insup Lee

Abstract: In medical cyber-physical systems (CPS), where patient safety is a top priority, the robustness of learning-enabled components (LECs) becomes crucial. Therefore, a comprehensive robustness evaluation is necessary for the successful deployment of these systems. Existing research predominantly focuses on robustness to synthetic adversarial examples, crafted by adding imperceptible perturbations to clean input data. However, these synthetic adversarial examples do not accurately reflect the most challenging real-world scenarios, especially in the context of healthcare data. Consequently, robustness to synthetic adversarial examples may not necessarily translate to robustness against naturally occurring adversarial examples. We propose a method to curate datasets comprised of natural adversarial examples to evaluate the robustness of LECs. The method relies on probabilistic labels obtained from automated weakly-supervised labeling that combines noisy and cheap-to-obtain labeling heuristics. Based on these labels, our method adversarially orders the input data and uses this ordering to construct a sequence of increasingly adversarial datasets. Our evaluation on six medical CPS case studies and three non-medical case studies demonstrates the efficacy and statistical validity of our approach to generating naturally adversarial datasets.