CertMask: Certifiable Defense Against Adversarial Patches via Theoretically Optimal Mask Coverage (2511.09834v1)

Abstract: Adversarial patch attacks inject localized perturbations into images to mislead deep vision models. These attacks can be physically deployed, posing serious risks to real-world applications. In this paper, we propose CertMask, a certifiably robust defense that constructs a provably sufficient set of binary masks to neutralize patch effects with strong theoretical guarantees. While the state-of-the-art approach (PatchCleanser) requires two rounds of masking and incurs $O(n^2)$ inference cost, CertMask performs only a single round of masking with $O(n)$ time complexity, where $n$ is the cardinality of the mask set to cover an input image. Our proposed mask set is computed using a mathematically rigorous coverage strategy that ensures each possible patch location is covered at least $k$ times, providing both efficiency and robustness. We offer a theoretical analysis of the coverage condition and prove its sufficiency for certification. Experiments on ImageNet, ImageNette, and CIFAR-10 show that CertMask improves certified robust accuracy by up to +13.4\% over PatchCleanser, while maintaining clean accuracy nearly identical to the vanilla model.