Adversarially robust generalization theory via Jacobian regularization for deep neural networks

Powerful deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To obtain adversarially robust models, researchers have separately developed adversarial training and Jacobian regularization techniques. There are abundant theoretical and empirical studies for adversarial training, but theoretical foundations for Jacobian regularization are still lacking. In this study, we show that Jacobian regularization is closely related to adversarial training in that ℓ2 or ℓ1 Jacobian regularized loss serves as an approximate upper bound on the adversarially robust loss under ℓ2 or ℓ∞ adversarial attack respectively. Further, we establish the robust generalization gap for Jacobian regularized risk minimizer via bounding the Rademacher complexity of both the standard loss function class and Jacobian regularization function class. Our theoretical results indicate that the norms of Jacobian are related to both standard and robust generalization. We also perform experiments on MNIST data classification to demonstrate that Jacobian regularized risk minimization indeed serves as a surrogate for adversarially robust risk minimization, and that reducing the norms of Jacobian can improve both standard and robust generalization. This study promotes both theoretical and empirical understandings to adversarially robust generalization via Jacobian regularization.