Towards Robust ResNet: A Small Step but a Giant Leap

Towards Robust ResNet: A Small Step but a Giant Leap

Jingfeng Zhang, Bo Han, Laura Wynter, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Mohan Kankanhalli

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4285-4291. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/595

This paper presents a simple yet principled approach to boosting the robustness of the residual network (ResNet) that is motivated by a dynamical systems perspective. Namely, a deep neural network can be interpreted using a partial differential equation, which naturally inspires us to characterize ResNet based on an explicit Euler method. This consequently allows us to exploit the step factor h in the Euler method to control the robustness of ResNet in both its training and generalization. In particular, we prove that a small step factor h can benefit its training and generalization robustness during backpropagation and forward propagation, respectively. Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets corroborates our analytical findings that a small h can indeed improve both its training and generalization robustness.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Deep Learning