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NeurIPS 2023

Multi-scale Diffusion Denoised Smoothing

Conference Paper Main Conference Track Artificial Intelligence ยท Machine Learning

Abstract

Along with recent diffusion models, randomized smoothing has become one of a few tangible approaches that offers adversarial robustness to models at scale, e. g. , those of large pre-trained models. Specifically, one can perform randomized smoothing on any classifier via a simple "denoise-and-classify" pipeline, so-called denoised smoothing, given that an accurate denoiser is available - such as diffusion model. In this paper, we present scalable methods to address the current trade-off between certified robustness and accuracy in denoised smoothing. Our key idea is to "selectively" apply smoothing among multiple noise scales, coined multi-scale smoothing, which can be efficiently implemented with a single diffusion model. This approach also suggests a new objective to compare the collective robustness of multi-scale smoothed classifiers, and questions which representation of diffusion model would maximize the objective. To address this, we propose to further fine-tune diffusion model (a) to perform consistent denoising whenever the original image is recoverable, but (b) to generate rather diverse outputs otherwise. Our experiments show that the proposed multi-scale smoothing scheme, combined with diffusion fine-tuning, not only allows strong certified robustness at high noise scales but also maintains accuracy close to non-smoothed classifiers. Code is available at https: //github. com/jh-jeong/smoothing-multiscale.

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Keywords

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Context

Venue
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Archive span
1987-2025
Indexed papers
30776
Paper id
63996899445311371
v2026.09.13