Robust Representation Consistency Model via Contrastive Denoising

Jiachen Lei, Julius Berner, Jiongxiao Wang, Zhongzhu Chen, Chaowei Xiao, Zhongjie Ba, Kui Ren, Jun Zhu, Anima Anandkumar

Keywords: Certified Robustness, Diffusion-based randomized smoothing

Abstract: Robustness is essential for deep neural networks, especially in security-sensitive applications. To this end, randomized smoothing provides theoretical guarantees for certifying robustness against adversarial perturbations. Recently, diffusion models have been successfully employed for randomized smoothing to purify noise-perturbed samples before making predictions with a standard classifier. While these methods excel at small perturbation radii, they struggle with larger perturbations and incur a significant computational overhead during inference compared to classical methods. To address this, we reformulate the generative modeling task along the diffusion trajectories in pixel space as a discriminative task in the latent space. Specifically, we use instance discrimination to achieve consistent representations along the trajectories by aligning temporally adjacent points. After fine-tuning based on the learned representations, our model enables implicit denoising-then-classification via a single prediction, substantially reducing inference costs. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance with minimal computation budget during inference. For example, our method outperforms the certified accuracy of diffusion-based methods on ImageNet across all perturbation radii by 5.3\% on average, with up to 11.6\% at larger radii, while reducing inference costs by 85x on average.

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

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Submission Number: 3548