title: On the Certified Robustness for Ensemble Models and Beyond
abstract: Recent studies show that deep neural networks (DNN) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which aim to mislead DNNs to make arbitrarily incorrect predictions. To defend against such attacks, both empirical and theoretical defense approaches have been proposed for a single ML model. In this work, we aim to explore and characterize the robustness conditions for ensemble ML models. We prove that the diversified gradient and large confidence margin are sufficient and necessary conditions for certifiably robust ensemble models under the model-smoothness assumption. We also show that an ensemble model can achieve higher certified robustness than a single base model based on these conditions. To our best knowledge, this is the first work providing tight conditions for the ensemble robustness. Inspired by our analysis, we propose the lightweight Diversity Regularized Training (DRT) for ensemble models. We derive the certified robustness of DRT based ensembles such as standard Weighted Ensemble and Max-Margin Ensemble following the sufficient and necessary conditions. Besides, to efficiently calculate the model-smoothness, we leverage adapted randomized model smoothing to obtain the certified robustness for different ensembles in practice. We show that the certified robustness of ensembles, on the other hand, verifies the necessity of DRT. To compare different ensembles, we prove that when the adversarial transferability among base models is high, Max-Margin Ensemble can achieve higher certified robustness than Weighted Ensemble; vice versa. Extensive experiments show that ensemble models trained with DRT can achieve the state-of-the-art certified robustness under various settings. Our work will shed light on future analysis for robust ensemble models. 
authors: Zhuolin Yang Linyi Li Xiaojun Xu Bhavya Kailkhura Bo Li
hIndex: Bhavya Kailkhura 23