Reinforced Compressive Neural Architecture Search for Versatile Adversarial Robustness

Abstract: Prior neural architecture search (NAS) for adversarial robustness works have discovered that a lightweight and adversarially robust neural network architecture could exist in a non-robust large teacher network, generally disclosed by heuristic rules through statistical analysis and neural architecture search, generally disclosed by heuristic rules from neural architecture search. However, heuristic methods cannot uniformly handle different adversarial attacks and "teacher" network capacity. To solve this challenge, we propose a Reinforced Compressive Neural Architecture Search (RC-NAS) for Versatile Adversarial Robustness. Specifically, we define task settings that compose datasets, adversarial attacks, and teacher network information. Given diverse tasks, we conduct a novel dual-level training paradigm that consists of a meta-training and a fine-tuning phase to effectively expose the RL agent to diverse attack scenarios (in meta-training), and making it adapt quickly to locate a sub-network (in fine-tuning) for any previously unseen scenarios. Experiments show that our framework could achieve adaptive compression towards different initial teacher networks, datasets, and adversarial attacks, resulting in more lightweight and adversarially robust architectures.