PRASS: Probabilistic Risk-averse Robust Learning with Stochastic Search

PRASS: Probabilistic Risk-averse Robust Learning with Stochastic Search

Tianle Zhang, Yanghao Zhang, Ronghui Mu, Jiaxu Liu, Jonathan Fieldsend, Wenjie Ruan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 559-567. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/62

Deep learning models, despite their remarkable success in various tasks, have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Although robust learning techniques that consider adversarial risks against worst-case perturbations can effectively increase a model's robustness, they may not always be the most suitable approach. This is due to the fact that in certain scenarios, perturbations are more likely to occur probabilistically rather than being intentionally crafted by attackers. To address this challenge, we propose a novel risk-averse robust learning method based on entropic value-at-risk, called PRASS (Probabilistical Risk-Averse Robust Learning with Stochastic Search). Our approach leverages principles of stochastic optimisation and considers perturbing distributions rather than solely worst-case adversaries. By applying adaptive stochastic search to parameterised distributions, we further enhance the scalability of PRASS to handle distributional robustness. Empirical experiments demonstrate that PRASS outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Trustworthy AI
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Safety and robustness
Machine Learning: ML: Adversarial machine learning
Machine Learning: ML: Robustness