RAMS-Trans: Recurrent Attention Multi-scale Transformer forFine-grained Image Recognition

In fine-grained image recognition (FGIR), the localization and amplification of region attention is an important factor, which has been explored a lot by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based approaches. The recently developed vision transformer (ViT) has achieved promising results on computer vision tasks. Compared with CNNs, Image sequentialization is a brand new manner. However, ViT is limited in its receptive field size and thus lacks local attention like CNNs due to the fixed size of its patches, and is unable to generate multi-scale features to learn discriminative region attention. To facilitate the learning of discriminative region attention without box/part annotations, we use the strength of the attention weights to measure the importance of the patch tokens corresponding to the raw images. We propose the recurrent attention multi-scale transformer (RAMS-Trans), which uses the transformer's self-attention to recursively learn discriminative region attention in a multi-scale manner. Specifically, at the core of our approach lies the dynamic patch proposal module (DPPM) guided region amplification to complete the integration of multi-scale image patches. The DPPM starts with the full-size image patches and iteratively scales up the region attention to generate new patches from global to local by the intensity of the attention weights generated at each scale as an indicator. Our approach requires only the attention weights that come with ViT itself and can be easily trained end-to-end. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAMS-Trans performs better than concurrent works, in addition to efficient CNN models, achieving state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets.

Reliable Adversarial Distillation with Unreliable Teachers

In ordinary distillation, student networks are trained with soft labels (SLs) given by pretrained teacher networks, and students are expected to improve upon teachers since SLs are stronger supervision than the original hard labels. However, when considering adversarial robustness, teachers may become unreliable and adversarial distillation may not work: teachers are pretrained on their own adversarial data, and it is too demanding to require that teachers are also good at every adversarial data queried by students. Therefore, in this paper, we propose reliable introspective adversarial distillation (IAD) where students partially instead of fully trust their teachers. Specifically, IAD distinguishes between three cases given a query of a natural data (ND) and the corresponding adversarial data (AD): (a) if a teacher is good at AD, its SL is fully trusted; (b) if a teacher is good at ND but not AD, its SL is partially trusted and the student also takes its own SL into account; (c) otherwise, the student only relies on its own SL. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of IAD for improving upon teachers in terms of adversarial robustness.

NoiLIn: Do Noisy Labels Always Hurt Adversarial Training?

Adversarial training (AT) based on minimax optimization is a popular learning style that enhances the model's adversarial robustness. Noisy labels (NL) commonly undermine the learning and hurt the model's performance. Interestingly, both research directions hardly crossover and hit sparks. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question -- Does NL always hurt AT? Firstly, we find that NL injection in inner maximization for generating adversarial data augments natural data implicitly, which benefits AT's generalization. Secondly, we find NL injection in outer minimization for the learning serves as regularization that alleviates robust overfitting, which benefits AT's robustness. To enhance AT's adversarial robustness, we propose "NoiLIn" that gradually increases \underline{Noi}sy \underline{L}abels \underline{In}jection over the AT's training process. Empirically, NoiLIn answers the previous question negatively -- the adversarial robustness can be indeed enhanced by NL injection. Philosophically, we provide a new perspective of the learning with NL: NL should not always be deemed detrimental, and even in the absence of NL in the training set, we may consider injecting it deliberately.

Guided Interpolation for Adversarial Training

To enhance adversarial robustness, adversarial training learns deep neural networks on the adversarial variants generated by their natural data. However, as the training progresses, the training data becomes less and less attackable, undermining the robustness enhancement. A straightforward remedy is to incorporate more training data, but sometimes incurring an unaffordable cost. In this paper, to mitigate this issue, we propose the guided interpolation framework (GIF): in each epoch, the GIF employs the previous epoch's meta information to guide the data's interpolation. Compared with the vanilla mixup, the GIF can provide a higher ratio of attackable data, which is beneficial to the robustness enhancement; it meanwhile mitigates the model's linear behavior between classes, where the linear behavior is favorable to generalization but not to the robustness. As a result, the GIF encourages the model to predict invariantly in the cluster of each class. Experiments demonstrate that the GIF can indeed enhance adversarial robustness on various adversarial training methods and various datasets.

CIFS: Improving Adversarial Robustness of CNNs via Channel-wise Importance-based Feature Selection

We investigate the adversarial robustness of CNNs from the perspective of channel-wise activations. By comparing \textit{non-robust} (normally trained) and \textit{robustified} (adversarially trained) models, we observe that adversarial training (AT) robustifies CNNs by aligning the channel-wise activations of adversarial data with those of their natural counterparts. However, the channels that are \textit{negatively-relevant} (NR) to predictions are still over-activated when processing adversarial data. Besides, we also observe that AT does not result in similar robustness for all classes. For the robust classes, channels with larger activation magnitudes are usually more \textit{positively-relevant} (PR) to predictions, but this alignment does not hold for the non-robust classes. Given these observations, we hypothesize that suppressing NR channels and aligning PR ones with their relevances further enhances the robustness of CNNs under AT. To examine this hypothesis, we introduce a novel mechanism, i.e., \underline{C}hannel-wise \underline{I}mportance-based \underline{F}eature \underline{S}election (CIFS). The CIFS manipulates channels' activations of certain layers by generating non-negative multipliers to these channels based on their relevances to predictions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets including CIFAR10 and SVHN clearly verify the hypothesis and CIFS's effectiveness of robustifying CNNs.

Understanding the Interaction of Adversarial Training with Noisy Labels

Noisy labels (NL) and adversarial examples both undermine trained models, but interestingly they have hitherto been studied independently. A recent adversarial training (AT) study showed that the number of projected gradient descent (PGD) steps to successfully attack a point (i.e., find an adversarial example in its proximity) is an effective measure of the robustness of this point. Given that natural data are clean, this measure reveals an intrinsic geometric property -- how far a point is from its class boundary. Based on this breakthrough, in this paper, we figure out how AT would interact with NL. Firstly, we find if a point is too close to its noisy-class boundary (e.g., one step is enough to attack it), this point is likely to be mislabeled, which suggests to adopt the number of PGD steps as a new criterion for sample selection for correcting NL. Secondly, we confirm AT with strong smoothing effects suffers less from NL (without NL corrections) than standard training (ST), which suggests AT itself is an NL correction. Hence, AT with NL is helpful for improving even the natural accuracy, which again illustrates the superiority of AT as a general-purpose robust learning criterion.

Learning Diverse-Structured Networks for Adversarial Robustness

In adversarial training (AT), the main focus has been the objective and optimizer while the model has been less studied, so that the models being used are still those classic ones in standard training (ST). Classic network architectures (NAs) are generally worse than searched NAs in ST, which should be the same in AT. In this paper, we argue that NA and AT cannot be handled independently, since given a dataset, the optimal NA in ST would be no longer optimal in AT. That being said, AT is time-consuming itself; if we directly search NAs in AT over large search spaces, the computation will be practically infeasible. Thus, we propose a diverse-structured network (DS-Net), to significantly reduce the size of the search space: instead of low-level operations, we only consider predefined atomic blocks, where an atomic block is a time-tested building block like the residual block. There are only a few atomic blocks and thus we can weight all atomic blocks rather than find the best one in a searched block of DS-Net, which is an essential trade-off between exploring diverse structures and exploiting the best structures. Empirical results demonstrate the advantages of DS-Net, i.e., weighting the atomic blocks.

Maximum Mean Discrepancy is Aware of Adversarial Attacks

The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) test, as a representative two-sample test, could in principle detect any distributional discrepancy between two datasets. However, it has been shown that MMD is unaware of adversarial attacks---MMD failed to detect the discrepancy between natural data and adversarial data generated by adversarial attacks. Given this phenomenon, we raise a question: are natural and adversarial data really from different distributions but previous use of MMD on the purpose missed some key factors? The answer is affirmative. We find the previous use missed three factors and accordingly we propose three components: (a) Gaussian kernel has limited representation power, and we replace it with a novel semantic-aware deep kernel; (b) test power of MMD was neglected, and we maximize it in order to optimize our deep kernel; (c) adversarial data may be non-independent, and to this end we apply wild bootstrap for validity of the test power. By taking care of the three factors, we validate that MMD is aware of adversarial attacks, which lights up a novel road for adversarial attack detection based on two-sample tests.

Geometry-aware Instance-reweighted Adversarial Training

In adversarial machine learning, there was a common belief that robustness and accuracy hurt each other. The belief was challenged by recent studies where we can maintain the robustness and improve the accuracy. However, the other direction, whether we can keep the accuracy while improving the robustness, is conceptually and practically more interesting, since robust accuracy should be lower than standard accuracy for any model. In this paper, we show this direction is also promising. Firstly, we find even over-parameterized deep networks may still have insufficient model capacity, because adversarial training has an overwhelming smoothing effect. Secondly, given limited model capacity, we argue adversarial data should have unequal importance: geometrically speaking, a natural data point closer to/farther from the class boundary is less/more robust, and the corresponding adversarial data point should be assigned with larger/smaller weight. Finally, to implement the idea, we propose geometry-aware instance-reweighted adversarial training, where the weights are based on how difficult it is to attack a natural data point. Experiments show that our proposal boosts the robustness of standard adversarial training; combining two directions, we improve both robustness and accuracy of standard adversarial training.