# VC Classes are Adversarially Robustly Learnable, but Only Improperly

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04217/

## Key facts

- Cited by 83 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 83)

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- [A PAC-Bayes Analysis of Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11069/) (2021)
- [Learning and Certification under Instance-targeted Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08709/) (2021)
- [A Characterization of Semi-Supervised Adversarially-Robust PAC Learnability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05420/) (2022)
- [Multiclass Online Learnability under Bandit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04620/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Resilience in Sequential Prediction via Abstention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13119/) (2023)
- [Understanding Generalization in Adversarial Training via the Bias-Variance Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09947/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the question of learning an adversarially robust predictor. We show that any hypothesis class H with finite VC dimension is robustly PAC learnable with an improper learning rule. The requirement of being improper is necessary as we exhibit examples of hypothesis classes H with finite VC dimension that are not robustly PAC learnable with any proper learning rule.
