Adversarial Robustness and Robust Meta-Learning for Neural Networks

Abstract

Despite the overwhelming success of neural networks for pattern recognition, these models behave categorically different from humans. Adversarial examples, small perturbations which are often undetectable to the human eye, easily fool neural networks, demonstrating that neural networks lack the robustness of human classifiers. This thesis comprises a sequence of three parts. First, we motivate the study of defense against adversarial examples with a case study on algorithmic trading in which robustness may be critical for security reasons. Second, we develop methods for hardening neural networks against an adversary, especially in the low-data regime, where meta-learning methods achieve state-of-the-art results. Finally, we discuss several properties of the neural network models we use. These properties are of interest beyond robustness to adversarial examples, and they extend to the broad setting of deep learning.