  While neural networks have achieved high accuracy on standard image
classification benchmarks, their accuracy drops to nearly zero in the presence
of small adversarial perturbations to test inputs. Defenses based on
regularization and adversarial training have been proposed, but often followed
by new, stronger attacks that defeat these defenses. Can we somehow end this
arms race? In this work, we study this problem for neural networks with one
hidden layer. We first propose a method based on a semidefinite relaxation that
outputs a certificate that for a given network and test input, no attack can
force the error to exceed a certain value. Second, as this certificate is
differentiable, we jointly optimize it with the network parameters, providing
an adaptive regularizer that encourages robustness against all attacks. On
MNIST, our approach produces a network and a certificate that no attack that
perturbs each pixel by at most \epsilon = 0.1 can cause more than 35% test
error.

Machine Learning