# Learning Robust Kernel Ensembles with Kernel Average Pooling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00062/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Fast is better than free: Revisiting adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03994/) (2020)
- [Evasion Attacks against Machine Learning at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06131/) (2017)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [On Adaptive Attacks to Adversarial Example Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08347/) (2020)
- [Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11569/) (2020)
- [Certified Robustness to Adversarial Examples with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03471/) (2018)
- [Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks: Reliable Attacks Against Black-Box Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04248/) (2017)
- [BatchEnsemble: An Alternative Approach to Efficient Ensemble and Lifelong Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06715/) (2020)
- [Neural Additive Models: Interpretable Machine Learning with Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13912/) (2020)
- [Feature Denoising for Improving Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03411/) (2018)
- [High Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13545/) (2019)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Improving Robustness using Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09468/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Logit Pairing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06373/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Foveated Retinotopy Improves Classification and Localization in Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15480/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model ensembles have long been used in machine learning to reduce the variance in individual model predictions, making them more robust to input perturbations. Pseudo-ensemble methods like dropout have also been commonly used in deep learning models to improve generalization. However, the application of these techniques to improve neural networks' robustness against input perturbations remains underexplored. We introduce Kernel Average Pooling (KAP), a neural network building block that applies the mean filter along the kernel dimension of the layer activation tensor. We show that ensembles of kernels with similar functionality naturally emerge in convolutional neural networks equipped with KAP and trained with backpropagation. Moreover, we show that when trained on inputs perturbed with additive Gaussian noise, KAP models are remarkably robust against various forms of adversarial attacks. Empirical evaluations on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, TinyImagenet, and Imagenet datasets show substantial improvements in robustness against strong adversarial attacks such as AutoAttack without training on any adversarial examples.