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Poster
When are Non-Parametric Methods Robust?
Robi Bhattacharjee · Kamalika Chaudhuri

Tue Jul 14 10:00 AM -- 10:45 AM & Tue Jul 14 09:00 PM -- 09:45 PM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 4 »

A growing body of research has shown that many classifiers are susceptible to adversarial examples -- small strategic modifications to test inputs that lead to misclassification. In this work, we study general non-parametric methods, with a view towards understanding when they are robust to these modifications. We establish general conditions under which non-parametric methods are r-consistent -- in the sense that they converge to optimally robust and accurate classifiers in the large sample limit.

Concretely, our results show that when data is well-separated, nearest neighbors and kernel classifiers are r-consistent, while histograms are not. For general data distributions, we prove that preprocessing by Adversarial Pruning (Yang et. al., 2019)-- that makes data well-separated -- followed by nearest neighbors or kernel classifiers also leads to r-consistency.

Keywords: Adversarial Examples · Learning Theory · Non-parametric Methods

Author Information

Robi Bhattacharjee (UCSD)
Kamalika Chaudhuri (University of California at San Diego)

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