Learning Robust Kernel Ensembles with Kernel Average Pooling

Pouya Bashivan, Adam Ibrahim, Amirozhan Dehghani, Yifei Ren

Keywords: convolutional neural networks, topographical neural networks, adversarial robustness, ensemble models

TL;DR: Using Kernel Average Pools for learning robust kernel ensembles in neural networks

Abstract: Model ensembles have long been used in machine learning to reduce the variance in individual model predictions, making them more robust to input perturbations. Pseudo-ensemble methods like dropout have also been commonly used in deep learning models to improve generalization. However, the application of these techniques to improve neural networks' robustness against input perturbations remains underexplored. We introduce \emph{Kernel Average Pool (KAP)}, a new neural network building block that applies the mean filter along the kernel dimension of the layer activation tensor. We show that ensembles of kernels with similar functionality naturally emerge in convolutional neural networks equipped with KAP and trained with backpropagation. Moreover, we show that when combined with activation noise, KAP models are remarkably robust against various forms of adversarial attacks. Empirical evaluations on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, TinyImagenet, and Imagenet datasets show substantial improvements in robustness against strong adversarial attacks such as AutoAttack that are on par with adversarially trained networks but are importantly obtained without training on any adversarial examples.

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