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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Distance for the Evaluation of Corruption Robustness of Machine Learning Classifiers</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Georg Siedel</string-name>
          <email>siedel.georg@baua.bund.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Silvia Vock</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Andrey Morozov</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Stefan Voß</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA)</institution>
          <country country="DE">Germany</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>University of Stuttgart</institution>
          ,
          <country country="DE">Germany</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Workshop Proce dings</institution>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2006</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>Robustness is a fundamental pillar of Machine Learning (ML) classifiers, substantially determining their reliability. Methods for assessing classifier robustness are therefore essential. In this work, we address the challenge of evaluating corruption robustness in a way that allows comparability and interpretability on a given dataset. We propose a test data augmentation method that uses a robustness distance ε derived from the datasets minimal class separation distance. The resulting MSCR (mean statistical corruption robustness) metric allows a dataset-specific comparison of diferent classifiers with respect to their corruption robustness. The MSCR value is interpretable, as it represents the classifiers avoidable loss of accuracy due to statistical corruptions. On 2D and image data, we show that the metric reflects diferent levels of classifier robustness. Furthermore, we observe unexpected optima in classifiers robust accuracy through training and testing classifiers with diferent levels of noise. While researchers have frequently reported on a significant tradeof on accuracy when training robust models, we strengthen the view that a tradeof between accuracy and corruption robustness is not inherent. Our results indicate that robustness training through simple data augmentation can already slightly improve accuracy.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>corruption robustness</kwd>
        <kwd>classifier</kwd>
        <kwd>class separation</kwd>
        <kwd>metric</kwd>
        <kwd>accuracy-robustness-tradeof</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>ML functions are deployed to an increasing extent
which demands a risk assessment1.</p>
      <p>Within the European domestic market, machinery
products are subject to regulation of the Machinery directive,</p>
      <p>Risk assessment includes risk estimation and
evaluation, where risk is defined as a combination of probability
and severity of a hazardous event. Therefore, once ML
functions are deployed in machinery products, where
their failure may lead to a hazardous event, being able
to quantify the probability and severity of their failures
becomes mandatory. However, there still exists a gap
between the regulative and normative requirements for
safety critical software and the existing methods to assess</p>
      <sec id="sec-1-1">
        <title>ML safety [1].</title>
        <p>This work targets ML classifiers, the failures of which
are misclassifications. Our focus is on the evaluation
of failure probability specifically, not on failure severity.
We address one specific failure mode of ML classifiers:
Corrupted or perturbed data inputs that cause a change
The IJCAI-ECAI-22 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Safety (AISafety
https://github.com/georgsiedel/
minimal-separation-corruption-robustness (G. Siedel)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
CEUR
htp:/ceur-ws.org
ISN1613-073</p>
        <p>CEUR</p>
        <p>Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
at a point  within a distance  &gt; 0 , if () = (
for all perturbed points</p>
        <p>
          that satisfy ( − 
′
[
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref3">2, 3</xref>
          ]. The
        </p>
        <p>-function can e.g. be an   -norm distance,
while  can be defined based on physical observations of
e.g. which perturbations are imperceptible for humans.</p>
        <p>Robustness is considered a desirable property since
intuitively, a slightly perturbed input (e.g. an imperceptibly
changed image) should not lead to a classifier changing
its corresponding prediction. In essence, a robustness
requirement demands that within a certain input
parameter space around  , all points 
have to share the same
class. This way, a robustness requirement adds
additional information on how the classifier should behave
near ground truth data points. Authors therefore argue
the importance of robustness, being a fundamental pillar
′
of reliability [4] and quality [5] of ML models.</p>
        <p>However, popular robustness training methods show
significantly lowered test accuracy compared to standard
training, which has lead to some authors discussing an
inherent, i.e. inevitable tradeof between accuracy and
robustness (see Section 2.2).</p>
        <p>Two types of robustness need to be clearly
distinguished [5, 6, 7]: adversarial robustness and corruption
robustness.
2Robustness includes resistance to any corruption-caused class
change, which may not be a failure mode when the original point
was already misclassified (cf. footnote 4).</p>
        <p>Adversarial inputs are perturbed data deliberately
optimized to fool a classifier into changing its output class.
Corruption robustness (sometimes: statistical
robustness) describes a model’s output stability not against
such worst-case, but against statistically distributed
input corruptions. The two types of robustness require
diferent training methods and are diferently hard to
achieve depending on the data dimension [6]. In practice,
training a model for one of the two robustness types only
shows limited or selective improvement for the other
type [7, 8, 9].</p>
        <p>In the field of research towards ML robustness, most
of the attention has been given to adversarial attack and
defense methods. However, from the perspective of
machinery safety and risk assessment, adversarial
robustness is mainly a security concern and therefore not in
the scope of this article. [10] argue that instead of
adversarial robustness evaluation, a corruption robustness
evaluation is often more applicable to obtain a real-world
robustness measure and it can be used to estimate a
probability of failure on potentially perturbed inputs for the
overall system.</p>
        <p>Contribution: In this paper, we investigate corruption
robustness using data augmentation for testing and
training3. Our key contributions are twofold:
• We propose the ” ” metric to evaluate and
compare classifiers corruption robustness. The
approach is independent of prior knowledge
about corruption distances, but utilizes
properties of the underlying dataset, giving the metric a
distinct interpretable meaning. We show
experimentally, that the metric captures diferent levels
of classifier corruption robustness.
• We evaluate the tradeof between accuracy and
robustness from the perspective of corruption
robustness and present arguments against the
tradeof being inherent.</p>
        <p>After giving an overview of related work, we present our
approach for the MSCR metric in section 3.1. We then
test our approach on simple 2D as well as image data
with the setup described in section 3.2. We present and
discuss the results in sections 4 and 5.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Related Work</title>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>2.1. Measuring corruption robustness</title>
        <p>Corruption robustness of classifiers can be numerically
evaluated by testing the ratio of correctly/incorrectly
classified inputs from a corrupted test dataset. This ratio
is called robust accuracy/error, in contrast to the ratio
3Code available on Github, see front page.
of correct classification on original test data (“clean
accuracy/error”). Robust accuracy represents a combined
measure for accuracy and robustness4. A useful way to
obtain a measure of robustness only is by subtracting
robust accuracy/error and clean accuracy/error [8, 11].</p>
        <p>In most cases, the corrupted test dataset is derived
from an original test dataset through data augmentation.
One or multiple corruptions out of some distribution are
added to every original data points. Figure 1 explains this
procedure of data augmentation with corruptions (dots)
being added to a test dataset (stars) with 2 parameters
and 2 classes. It illustrates how a 100% accurate but
nonrobust classifier achieves lower robust accuracy on the
augmented data points.</p>
        <p>The corruption distribution can be defined e.g. based
on physical observations. For the example of image data,
[8, 12] add corruptions like brightness, blur and contrast,
while [13, 14] use special weather or sensor corruptions.
[8] created robustness benchmarks for the most popular
image datasets based on such physical corruptions.</p>
        <p>Corruption distributions can also be defined without
physical representations by adding e.g. Gaussian-,
saltand-pepper-, or uniformly distributed noise of certain
magnitude to the inputs [8, 11, 14, 10]. Figure 1
exemplary demonstrates uniformly distributed noise within
 2-norm distance  (in 2D,  2-norm is a circle) of the data
points.</p>
        <p>
          With PROVEN, [15] propose a framework that uses
statistical data augmentation to estimate bounds on
ad4The term astuteness can be used for robust accuracy to diferentiate
the term from robustness, see [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ]. Throughout this work, we use
the popular term robustness to describe our metric for consistency
with works like [8] and [10].
versarial robustness of a model, essentially combining the
evaluation of both adversarial and corruption robustness.
        </p>
        <p>
          [4] take a robustness evaluation approach diferent
from measuring robust accuracy. The authors augment
the entire input space with uniformly distributed data
points, independent of a test dataset. They divide the
input space into cells, the size of which is based on the
r-separation distance described in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ] and in section 2.2.
This way, they can assign a conflict free ground truth
class to each cell and evaluate the misclassification ratio
on all added data points. The approach allows for
statistical testing of the entire input space, but does not scale
well to high dimensions.
        </p>
        <p>
          An analytical way of measuring the robustness of a
classifier is through describing the characteristics of its
decision boundary. One possibility is to estimate the
local Lipschitzness, i.e. a tightened continuity property
of models in proximity to data points. To the best of our
knowledge however, Lipschitzness has only been used to
investigate adversarial, not corruption robustness [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref3">2, 3</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>Both the measure in [4] and Lipschitzness values lack
distinct interpretability in terms of what the calculated
value represents exactly.
2.2. The Accuracy-Robustness-Tradeof</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Method</title>
      <p>Significant efort has recently been put into increasing
classifier robustness, commonly targeting adversarial ro- holds, where  is the corruption distance for which
robustness, e.g. in [9, 16, 17, 18, 19]. All these methods bustness is evaluated and  is half this minimal class
sepcause a significant drop in clean accuracy. aration distance. We adopt this notation and set   = 
[11, 20] and [10] observe a clear tradeof between as our corner case corruption distance (see Figure 2). The
corruption robustness and accuracy for diferent train- value   is not related to any prior physical knowledge
ing methods using data augmentation. The two former of e.g. which corruptions are imperceptible, but is specific
works then propose specialized training methods for miti- for the given dataset, i.e. it is based on the fundamental
gating parts of this tradeof on the popular image datasets property of minimal class separation. Accordingly, we
CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. call our metric “Minimal Separation Corruption
Robust</p>
      <p>
        Based on such research, [19] and [21] discuss a tradeof ness” (MSCR).
between accuracy and robustness, while [22] even argue
that the cause for this tradeof is inherent, i.e. inevitable. 3.1. MSCR metric
A counterargument is presented by [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ], who argue that
accuracy and robustness are not necessarily at odds as
long as data points from diferent classes are separated
far enough from each other (see section 3). The authors
measure this “r-separation” between diferent classes on
various image datasets and find it to be high enough
for classifiers to be both accurate and robust for typical
perturbation distances.
      </p>
      <p>
        To measure corruption robustness, we carry out data
augmentation on the test data with uniformly distributed
corruptions, generated by a random sampling algorithm,
similar to the method shown by [10]. In contrast to [10],
we set the upper bound of the distance   , within which
the augmented noise is distributed, to   , as required in
Equation 1 (see Figure 2 for an illustration). We measure
robust accuracy on the augmented data, which
corresponds to a combination of clean accuracy and corruption
robustness. However, we want to quantify robustness
independent of clean accuracy for comparability, so we
subtract the clean accuracy (  ) from the robust
accuracy on   -augmented test data ( − ) and
normalize by the clean accuracy:
Our robustness evaluation approach is based on this same
idea by [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ], who measure the distance 2r for a dataset,
which is the minimal distance between any two points of
diferent classes (2r in Figure 2). The authors argue that
  = (
− 
)/
(2)
According to [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ], a classifier can in principle be robust on
such augmented noise of magnitude  
ing accuracy. This can be seen from Figure 2, where the
      </p>
      <p>while
maintaincircles of radius</p>
      <p>in which data is augmented, never
overlap for diferent classes. We use an identical radius</p>
      <p>for all classes, assuming that the separation of data
points from the classifiers decision boundary is equally
important for all classes. For this noise level  
non-robust behavior is theoretically avoidable, since a</p>
      <p>, any
classifiers decision boundary can separate the classes
even with augmented data, as long as the ML algorithm
is capable of learning the exact function. The MSCR
metric therefore measures the (relative) win or loss in
accuracy when testing on such noisy data that any loss
is just about avoidable. Figure 2 illustrates the impact of
the proposed metric using three corner cases:
=</p>
      <p>, solid line in

 
 

−</p>
      <p>= (
 = (∑=1  
−</p>
      <p>− 
 )/ 
Test model with original test data
(

= 0) → return</p>
      <p>sample  points within (
augment the test data</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>For every test data point: Uniform random</title>
        <p>Test model with data from step 6 → return</p>
        <p>) and

)/

sult to be possible.</p>
        <p>that trained to be very robust, we expect this re- the work of [10], we extensively evaluate more
corrupAlgorithm 1 shows the MSCR calculation procedure. In
step 1, diferent distance functions (e.g.  ∞-norm) can
be applied. We account for randomness in the data
splitting, model training and data augmentation procedures
by carrying out multiple runs of the same experiment
and reporting average values and 95%-confidence
intervals over all runs. The reasonable number of augmented
points k per original data point varies depending on the
dataset (see section 3.2). Within the respective for-loop,
variable</p>
        <p>runs through the list of all classifier
models to be compared, while  counts up to (the overall
number of)</p>
        <p>.</p>
        <sec id="sec-3-1-1">
          <title>3.2. Experimental details</title>
          <p>Additionally to test data augmentation, we train multiple
models on datasets augmented with diferent corruption
distances</p>
          <p>. Increasing a model’s  
a growing MSCR value, as it is expected that the model
robustness grows. This way, we evaluate the trend of
the MSCR value for models with diferent corruption
robustness levels. Also, on test data corrupted with large
should lead to
=</p>
          <p>are expected to
perform best [10].
 , models trained with</p>
          <p>As demonstrated in Figure 2, corruption levels below</p>
          <p>
            theoretically allow a classifier to be robust while not
losing test accuracy. We investigate this theoretical claim
by [
            <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
            ] additionally to the MSCR metric by evaluating
changes in robust accuracy when augmenting multiple
corruption levels  
to the test dataset. In contrast to
          </p>
          <p>specifically.
tion levels below, around and including  
In contrast to the work of [11] and [20], we use simple
uniformly distributed data augmentation with a fixed
upper bound of noise for the entire dataset instead of
Gaussian noise. This allows us the comparison of the
noise levels with the class separation distances. It shall be
noted however that in contrast to Gaussian noise, where
density decreases with distance, uniform noise does not
reflect the higher uncertainty in a class assignment when
the distance from a ground truth data point increases.</p>
          <p>
            Even though our data augmentation method is simple,
we still expect to find counterexamples for the
accuracyrobustness-tradeof, based solely on the class-separation
theory. We believe that the case of finding such
counterexamples with less advanced methods than e.g. [11]
represents even more credible evidence for the argument
of [
            <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
            ] against an inherent accuracy-robustness-tradeof.
          </p>
          <p>We carry out the experiments on 3 binary class 2D
datasets as were used and provided by [4]. For clarity,
we only report results with  ∞-corruptions on one of
those datasets, which is shown in Figure 3 and features
4674 data points. Experiments with the other 2D datasets
and  2-corruptions exhibit similar fundamental results,
which can also be found in our Github repository (see</p>
          <p>
            For both datasets it is visible from the last rows of
frontpage). The two input parameters [0] and [
            <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
            ] are
normalized to the interval [
            <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">0, 1</xref>
            ]. For classification, we
use a random forest (RF) algorithm with 100 trees. We
also compare this classifier with a 1-nearest-neighbor
model, which is known to be inherently robust, since it
classifies based on distance to the 1 nearest data point.
          </p>
          <p>We choose  = 10 augmented data points per original
data point, as we found higher numbers of  not
significantly improving the resulting robust accuracy and its
standard deviation. This efect of diferent values for the
hyperparameter  is displayed in Figure 4. In order to
achieve statistically representative results, we evaluate
how the average test accuracy converges over multiple
runs and accordingly choose 1200 runs.</p>
          <p>
            The experiments are additionally run in a more applied
image classification setting using benchmark dataset
CIFAR-10. We adopt the classifier architecture from [ 10],
using a 28-10 wide residual network with SGD optimizer,
0.3 dropout rate, training batch size 32 and 30 epochs with
a 3-step decreasing learning rate. All pixel values are
normalized to [
            <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">0, 1</xref>
            ] and random horizontal flips and random
tion. For CIFAR-10 we choose  = 1 , since [10] report  
one augmented point to be suficient. We suspect that
this is due to the multiple epochs of the training process,
which allows to train the model on multiple
augmentations per training data point. We choose 20 runs due to
computational feasibility of all training procedures.
Table 1 shows the minimal class separation distances 2 and
the corresponding
          </p>
          <p>values, measured in  ∞-distance
for both datasets. For intuition, the CIFAR-10  
translates to a maximum color grade change of 27/255
on all pixels. Higher values for 2 are to be expected
for image data, since  ∞-norm evaluates the maximum
distance in any of the 3072 dimensions of CIFAR-10 input</p>
          <p>value
data.
crops with 4px padding are used for training generaliza- levels, the optimum robust accuracies are achieved with
Minimal  ∞ class separation and corresponding</p>
          <p>Dataset
2D dataset
CIFAR-10 (train and test set)
2 ( ∞)</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Results</title>
      <p>Clean accuracies (first row) and robust accuracies in percentage plus the MSCR value (last row) for various models (columns)
± the 95% confidence intervals. Models are trained and tested with diferent levels of  ∞-noise (

along columns,  
along
rows). Bold accuracies: Best model accuracy for every noise level. Bold MSCR value: Highest MSCR value, i.e. highest model
robustness. Last row color scale: Highlights the constant increase of MSCR with increasing  
trained and tested on the same noise level (

=   ). Dark grey accuracies: Maximum overall accuracy.</p>
      <p>. Light grey accuracies: Model


     
higghreeyralcecvueralcsies: Model trained and tested. oFnotrhebsoatmhe dnoaitsaesleevtse,l (  ac curac y- r)o. bDuasrktngeresys-atcrcaudreacoif efso:rMthaxeimmuomdeolvsertarlal iancecudrawcyit.h
of training noise  = 
the MSCR increases from negative values on less robust
by contrasting MSCR versus clean accuracy
trained models to zero and even positive values for more
values. Both Figures in principle show a tradeof curve.
robust trained models.</p>
      <p>For CIFAR-10, the MSCR values are overall much larger
than for the 2D data. This efect correlates with the 
noise level, which is about 26 times larger in absolute</p>
      <p>However, it is visible that for</p>
      <p>≤ 0.007 on 2D data
≤ 0.01 on CIFAR-10, both clean accuracy and
robustness increase compared to the baseline model with</p>
      <p>= 0. The tradeof is overcome for these models
diferent   
and   
  
values.
ative diference that we named MSCR steadily increases
in particular, this
relClean Accuracy RF
Clean Accuracy 1NN</p>
      <p>εtrain
(a) Clean Accuracy
2D Dataset</p>
      <p>0,02
Model with εtrain =
Baseline Model
98%</p>
      <p>99%</p>
      <p>Clean Accuracy
(a) 2D Dataset
0,015</p>
      <p>​
0.007 &amp; 0.01
εmin
0
0,002
0,001
100%
1NN vs. RF over training noise on 2D Dataset
1NN vs. RF over training noise on 2D Dataset
0,10
0,05
CR0,05
S
, compared to
= 0. Models with both higher MSCR and higher clean accuracy (when the curve evolves towards
with higher corruption robustness of the RF model on 2D
herently robust model such as 1NN, which fits its
decidata and the wide residual network on CIFAR-10. This
sion boundary based on maximum class separation. The
way, we verify the metric’s capability to reflect the
corMSCR values are able to correctly display this
interrelaruption robustness of diferent models. However, this
tion.
claim is based on the assumption that increasing
corruption robustness of our models can be generated through
training with higher noise levels. This seems evident
based on research by [10], but requires future validation
like in [11], who confirm that their Gaussian robustness
metric is strongly correlated with the popular physical
corruptions benchmark by [8].</p>
      <p>On the 2D dataset, the 1NN model shows a constant,
superior MSCR value compared to the RF model for all</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>MSCR metric</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>5.2. Disadvantages and advantages of the</title>
        <p>In our experiments, the steady robustness increase for
higher  
than  
as the underlying robustness requirement, is only one
particular case of this robustness calculation approach.</p>
        <p>. The MSCR value, which uses</p>
        <p>-corruptions
also holds for other levels of testing noise</p>
        <p>≤ 0.007, where classes are still predominantly sep- It has to be emphasized that from our results in Tables 2
arated. This is the performance expected from an in- and 3, we cannot observe any conspicuities for  
∼   .


For example, there is no indication that models perform
to  
= 0 does not achieve 95%-confidence in a
pairwell below this noise level while massively dropping of
wise statistical comparison. More than 20 runs are
necesat higher noise levels, as could be presumed from the
sary to obtain statistically significant results, which we
r-separation theory. It is therefore evident to conclude
could not achieve due to limited computational resources.
that measuring corruption robustness works with other
Hence, we only treat our results on CIFAR-10 regarding
 -values. In practice, if specific corruptions are known
for an application, those corruptions should also be used
for testing, e.g. through benchmarks [8].
the accuracy-robustness-tradeof as suggestions.</p>
        <p>The suggestion that some</p>
        <p>&gt; 0 leads to higher
clean accuracy than  
= 0 has theoretical relevance.</p>
        <p>
          However, we emphasize that the MSCR metric is ad- It supports the claim made, but not practically proven by
vantageous in two ways: First, it does not require prior
[
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ], that accuracy and robustness are not in an inherent
physical knowledge to define corruption distributions,
like e.g. [8] does. Instead, it only requires measuring the
actual class separation from any classification dataset.
tradeof as long as the noise level  fulfills Equation 1.
        </p>
        <p>The result also seems relevant from a practical
perspective, since developers may try some  
for training
Second, the MSCR can be interpreted with a clear
contexdata augmentation, which increases robustness without
tual meaning, since the robustness requirement is derived
drawbacks regarding accuracy. We emphasize that this
from the dataset: It measures “the theoretically avoidable
practical implication is only valid for the very limited
loss (or win) of accuracy due to statistical corruptions”.
model architectures, datasets and augmentation
distribu</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>5.3. On achieving high MSCR values</title>
        <p>Clearly, avoiding any loss of accuracy on  
hard to achieve in practice on high-dimensional data. For
-noise is
CIFAR-10,   = 0</p>
        <p>can be achieved, but only with</p>
        <p>= 0.07, where the clean accuracy declines by 3 per-  
conjecture that   &gt; 0
centage points compared to  
= 0. We also verify our
is possible for some robust
trained models. For this behavior, we find the discovery
in [23] a convincing technical explanation. Misclassified
data points tend to lie closer to the decision boundary
than correctly classified data points. The data
augmentations on a misclassified data point therefore have a
high chance of causing a favorable class change. At the
same time, data augmentations on correctly classified
points have a lower chance of causing an unfavorable
class change when their distance to the decision
boundary is high, which is what a robust model is trained for.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>5.4. The accuracy-robustness-tradeof</title>
        <p>Besides our investigation of the MSCR metric, we
report on findings regarding the tradeof between accuracy
and corruption robustness. For both 2D and CIFAR-10
datasets we observe higher clean and robust accuracy
on any test noise when training a model with a specific
level of uniform noise (

= 0.007 for 2D,  
for CIFAR-10), compared to standard training. For the
= 0.01
2D data, this optimum  
value is even higher than</p>
        <p>, the value which the r-separation theory suggests to
be beneficial for robustness while not hurting accuracy.
This could be due to the major proportion of minimal
distances of data points to other classes being
significantly bigger than</p>
        <p>. Our results are statistically
significant for the 2D dataset experiment. For 20 runs per
trained model on CIFAR-10, we emphasize that claiming
higher mean clean accuracy for any  
&gt; 0 compared
tions we tested. For example, our experiments show that
noise training below</p>
        <p>has no efect on an inherently
robust model such as 1NN. This is due to the fact that this
model type maximizes the class separation of its decision
boundary in training anyways.</p>
        <p>On the one hand, overcoming the tradeof for small
is not entirely surprising, since it is well known
that data transformations and data augmentations can
increase generalization of models (in fact, we also used
random flips and crops for CIFAR-10 training). [ 11] and
[20] also manage to overcome the tradeof with more
advanced training methods. On the other hand, our results
are surprising considering this drawback-free increase in
robust accuracy is quite significant for the RF model on
2D data (less than halving the classification error). Also,
uniform  ∞ data augmentation is a very simple method
and less contextually relevant compared to physically
derived augmentations. An explanation may be that the
uniform   -norm noise allows a stricter coverage of the
input parameter space near data points compared to
physical data augmentations, enforcing a smooth model that
is less prone to overfitting the corruptions.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-5">
        <title>5.5. Class separation distance for model training</title>
        <p>From our results we also need to conclude that in
pracvalue has only limited expressiveness when
tice, the  
trying to find the optimal  
accuracy. This is visible in Figures 6a and 6b, where
based solely on the r-separation theory, we may have
expected the curve to reverse its trend along the x-axis
with regards to (robust)
when  
levels their high  ∞ class separation distance
. In reality, the best overall accuracy
∼ 2 ∗</p>
        <p>, while on
&lt;   /5 . We suspect
inevitably entails. We suspect that on other datasets  
may be even greater and further away from the optimum
5.6. Optima of</p>
        <p>vs.  
Another interesting finding from the accuracy matrix
of both datasets is that the best  
value for models
evaluated with certain  
diagonal. For example,  
to prepare for  
deviates from the expected
= 0.03 is not the best choice
= 0.03. In Figure 7, the accuracy
matrix for CIFAR-10 from Table 3 is visualized in a 3D
plot, which shows how the optima in (robust) accuracy
deviate from the diagonal. It appears that for low noise
noise levels</p>
        <p>&lt;  
levels the best choice is  
is more favorable. This suspected
&gt;   , while for higher
dependency needs further investigation.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>6. Conclusion</title>
      <p>In this article we evaluated a data augmentation method
in order to obtain a comparable, interpretable measure
of corruption robustness for classifiers. We measured
the relative diference between the robust accuracy on
corrupted test data and the clean accuracy. We proposed
to use half the minimal class separation distance
measured from the dataset as the maximum distance  
of the augmented test noise. This robustness
requirement does not presume any prior knowledge about real
corruption distances. It theoretically allows a classifier
to be fully robust while not losing accuracy. The class
separation distance therefore gives our metric a distinct
meaning: It represents any “avoidable” loss (or win) in
accuracy due to corruptions. We experimentally showed
that our metric is able to reflect various degrees of model</p>
      <p>However, the minimal class separation distance could
in practice not guide us towards the optimal values of
training noise. These findings regarding the
accuracyrobustness-tradeof could in our opinion be useful in
practice.
training procedures mitigating the
accuracy-robustnesstradeof, since the combination of both properties is
essential from a risk assessment perspective.
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