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#518 LACMUS Latent Concept Masking for General Robustness Enhancement of DNNs Hongsheng Hu

CommunityIEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy14 minAdvancedOpen on YouTube ↗

Security researchers examine technical aspects of #518 LACMUS Latent Concept Masking for General Robustness Enhancement of DNNs Hongsheng Hu.

Summary

Robustness problem

Presenters from UNSW, Monash, and CSIRO at IEEE S&P introduce LACMUS (latent concept masking) to improve deep neural network robustness against adversarial pixel perturbations, semantic shifts such as lighting changes, and out-of-distribution samples where standard training fails.

Limits of adversarial training

Classic adversarial training mixes benign and adversarial examples but tends to be attack-specific, hurts clean accuracy, relies on low-level noise hard to interpret, and needs many adversarial samples. They identify four research gaps driving their method.

LACMUS approach

LACMUS encodes inputs through a VQ-VAE-style encoder into vectors matched against a pretrained concept codebook, masks or replaces concepts, decodes perturbed samples, and treats misclassified reconstructions as conceptual adversarial examples for training. Experiments using under one percent of training data report maintained clean accuracy and broader resilience to pixel, semantic, and distribution-shift attacks on MNIST and related sets.

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