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Poster

Sparse DNNs with Improved Adversarial Robustness

Yiwen Guo · Chao Zhang · Changshui Zhang · Yurong Chen

Room 210 #21

Keywords: [ Sparsity and Compressed Sensing ] [ Adversarial Networks ] [ Efficient Inference Methods ] [ CNN Architectures ]


Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are computationally/memory-intensive and vulnerable to adversarial attacks, making them prohibitive in some real-world applications. By converting dense models into sparse ones, pruning appears to be a promising solution to reducing the computation/memory cost. This paper studies classification models, especially DNN-based ones, to demonstrate that there exists intrinsic relationships between their sparsity and adversarial robustness. Our analyses reveal, both theoretically and empirically, that nonlinear DNN-based classifiers behave differently under $l_2$ attacks from some linear ones. We further demonstrate that an appropriately higher model sparsity implies better robustness of nonlinear DNNs, whereas over-sparsified models can be more difficult to resist adversarial examples.

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