Data-Dependent Randomized Smoothing

Motasem Alfarra, Adel Bibi, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem

Keywords: Network Certification, Randomized Smoothing

Abstract: Randomized smoothing is a recent technique that achieves state-of-art performance in training certifiably robust deep neural networks. While the smoothing family of distributions is often connected to the choice of the norm used for certification, the parameters of these distributions are always set as global hyper parameters independent from the input data on which a network is certified. In this work, we revisit Gaussian randomized smoothing and show that the variance of the Gaussian distribution can be optimized at each input so as to maximize the certification radius for the construction of the smooth classifier. We also propose a simple memory-based approach to certifying the resultant smooth classifier. This new approach is generic, parameter-free, and easy to implement. In fact, we show that our data dependent framework can be seamlessly incorporated into 3 randomized smoothing approaches, leading to consistent improved certified accuracy. When this framework is used in the training routine of these approaches followed by a data dependent certification, we achieve 9% and 6% improvement over the certified accuracy of the strongest baseline for a radius of 0.5 on CIFAR10 and ImageNet.

One-sentence Summary: We optimize the parameters of the smoothing distribution for randomized smooth classifiers to maximize the certified radius for each input point.