DiffSmooth: Certifiably Robust Learning via Diffusion Models and Local Smoothing

Diffusion models have been leveraged to perform adversarial purification and thus provide both empirical and certified robustness for a standard model. On the other hand, different robustly trained smoothed models have been studied to improve the certified robustness. Thus, it raises a natural question: Can diffusion model be used to achieve improved certified robustness on those robustly trained smoothed models? In this work, we first theoretically show that recovered instances by diffusion models are in the bounded neighborhood of the original instance with high probability; and the "one-shot" denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) can approximate the mean of the generated distribution of a continuous-time diffusion model, which approximates the original instance under mild conditions. Inspired by our analysis, we propose a certifiably robust pipeline DiffSmooth, which first performs adversarial purification via diffusion models and then maps the purified instances to a common region via a simple yet effective local smoothing strategy. We conduct extensive experiments on different datasets and show that DiffSmooth achieves SOTA-certified robustness compared with eight baselines. For instance, DiffSmooth improves the SOTA-certified accuracy from $36.0\%$ to $53.0\%$ under $\ell_2$ radius $1.5$ on ImageNet. The code is available at [https://github.com/javyduck/DiffSmooth].

Performative Federated Learning: A Solution to Model-Dependent and Heterogeneous Distribution Shifts

We consider a federated learning (FL) system consisting of multiple clients and a server, where the clients aim to collaboratively learn a common decision model from their distributed data. Unlike the conventional FL framework that assumes the client's data is static, we consider scenarios where the clients' data distributions may be reshaped by the deployed decision model. In this work, we leverage the idea of distribution shift mappings in performative prediction to formalize this model-dependent data distribution shift and propose a performative federated learning framework. We first introduce necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique performative stable solution and characterize its distance to the performative optimal solution. Then we propose the performative FedAvg algorithm and show that it converges to the performative stable solution at a rate of O(1/T) under both full and partial participation schemes. In particular, we use novel proof techniques and show how the clients' heterogeneity influences the convergence. Numerical results validate our analysis and provide valuable insights into real-world applications.

DensePure: Understanding Diffusion Models towards Adversarial Robustness

Diffusion models have been recently employed to improve certified robustness through the process of denoising. However, the theoretical understanding of why diffusion models are able to improve the certified robustness is still lacking, preventing from further improvement. In this study, we close this gap by analyzing the fundamental properties of diffusion models and establishing the conditions under which they can enhance certified robustness. This deeper understanding allows us to propose a new method DensePure, designed to improve the certified robustness of a pretrained model (i.e. classifier). Given an (adversarial) input, DensePure consists of multiple runs of denoising via the reverse process of the diffusion model (with different random seeds) to get multiple reversed samples, which are then passed through the classifier, followed by majority voting of inferred labels to make the final prediction. This design of using multiple runs of denoising is informed by our theoretical analysis of the conditional distribution of the reversed sample. Specifically, when the data density of a clean sample is high, its conditional density under the reverse process in a diffusion model is also high; thus sampling from the latter conditional distribution can purify the adversarial example and return the corresponding clean sample with a high probability. By using the highest density point in the conditional distribution as the reversed sample, we identify the robust region of a given instance under the diffusion model's reverse process. We show that this robust region is a union of multiple convex sets, and is potentially much larger than the robust regions identified in previous works. In practice, DensePure can approximate the label of the high density region in the conditional distribution so that it can enhance certified robustness.