Robust Convolutional Neural Networks under Adversarial Noise

Recent studies have shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are vulnerable to a small perturbation of input called “adversarial examples”. In this work, we propose a new feedforward CNN that improves robustness in the presence of adversarial noise. Our model uses stochastic additive noise added to the input image and to the CNN models. The proposed model operates in conjunction with a CNN trained with standard backpropagation algorithm. In particular, convolution, max-pooling, and ReLU layers are modified to benefit from the noise model. Our model is parameterized by only a mean and variance per pixel which simplifies computations and makes our method scalable to a deep architecture. The proposed model outperforms the standard CNN by 13.12% on ImageNet and 7.37% on CIFAR-10 under adversarial noise at the expense of 0.28% of accuracy drop when used in the original dataset – with no added noise.