Learning Better Certified Models from Empirically-Robust Teachers

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission16772 Authors

Keywords: Certified Training, Adversarial Robustness, Knowledge Distillation, Neural Network Verification

TL;DR: We show that knowledge distillation from adversarially-trained teachers improves the state-of-the-art in deterministic certified training for ReLU networks.

Abstract: Adversarial training attains strong empirical robustness to specific adversarial attacks by training on concrete adversarial perturbations, but it produces neural networks that are not amenable to strong robustness certificates through neural network verification. On the other hand, earlier certified training schemes directly train on bounds from network relaxations to obtain models that are certifiably robust, but display sub-par standard performance. Recent work has shown that state-of-the-art trade-offs between certified robustness and standard performance can be obtained through a family of losses combining adversarial outputs and neural network bounds. Nevertheless, differently from empirical robustness, verifiability still comes at a significant cost in standard performance. In this work, we propose to leverage empirically-robust teachers to improve the performance of certifiably-robust models through knowledge distillation. Using a versatile feature-space distillation objective, we show that distillation from adversarially-trained teachers consistently improves on the state-of-the-art in certified training for ReLU networks across a series of robust computer vision benchmarks.

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

Submission Number: 16772