Supervised Contrastive Prototype Learning: Augmentation Free Robust Neural Network

Transformations in the input space of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) lead to unintended changes in the feature space. Almost perceptually identical inputs, such as adversarial examples, can have significantly distant feature representations. On the contrary, Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples can have highly similar feature representations to training set samples. Our theoretical analysis for DNNs trained with a categorical classification head suggests that the inflexible logit space restricted by the classification problem size is one of the root causes for the lack of textitrobustness. Our second observation is that DNNs over-fit to the training augmentation technique and do not learn textitnuance invariant representations. Inspired by the recent success of prototypical and contrastive learning frameworks for both improving robustness and learning nuance invariant representations, we propose a training framework, Supervised Contrastive Prototype Learning (SCPL). We use N-pair contrastive loss with prototypes of the same and opposite classes and replace a categorical classification head with a Prototype Classification Head (PCH). Our approach is textitsample efficient, does not require textitsample mining, can be implemented on any existing DNN without modification to their architecture, and combined with other training augmentation techniques. We empirically evaluate the clean robustness of our method on out-of-distribution and adversarial samples. Our framework outperforms other state-of-the-art contrastive and prototype learning approaches in textitrobustness.