Adversarially robust unsupervised domain adaptation

Lianghe Shi, Weiwei Liu

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been successfully applied in many contexts with domain shifts. However, we find that existing UDA methods are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. A direct modification of the existing UDA methods to improve adversarial robustness is to feed the algorithms with adversarial source examples. However, empirical results show that traditional discrepancy fails to measure the distance between adversarial examples, leading to poor alignment between adversarial examples of source and target domains and inefficient transfer of the robustness from source domain to target domain. And the traditional theoretical bounds do not always hold in adversarial scenarios. Accordingly, we first propose a novel adversarial discrepancy (AD) to narrow the gap between adversarial robustness and UDA. Based on AD, this paper provides a generalization error bound for adversarially robust unsupervised domain adaptation through the lens of Rademacher complexity, theoretically demonstrating that the expected adversarial target error can be bounded by empirical adversarial source error and AD. We also present the upper bounds of Rademacher complexity, with a particular focus on linear models and multi-layer neural networks under ℓr<math><msub is="true"><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">ℓ</mi></mrow><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">r</mi></mrow></msub></math> attack (r≥1<math><mi is="true">r</mi><mo is="true">≥</mo><mn is="true">1</mn></math>). Inspired by this theory, we go on to develop an adversarially robust algorithm for UDA. We further conduct comprehensive experiments to support our theory and validate the robustness improvement of our proposed method on challenging domain adaptation tasks.

External IDs:dblp:journals/ai/ShiL25