PAC-learning in the presence of adversaries

Authors: Daniel Cullina, Arjun Nitin Bhagoji, Prateek Mittal

NeurIPS 2018 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical In this paper, we step away from the attack-defense arms race and seek to understand the limits of what can be learned in the presence of an evasion adversary. In particular, we extend the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-learning framework to account for the presence of an adversary. We first define corrupted hypothesis classes which arise from standard binary hypothesis classes in the presence of an evasion adversary and derive the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC)-dimension for these, denoted as the adversarial VC-dimension. We then show that sample complexity upper bounds from the Fundamental Theorem of Statistical learning can be extended to the case of evasion adversaries, where the sample complexity is controlled by the adversarial VC-dimension. We then explicitly derive the adversarial VC-dimension for halfspace classifiers in the presence of a sample-wise norm-constrained adversary of the type commonly studied for evasion attacks and show that it is the same as the standard VC-dimension. Finally, we prove that the adversarial VC-dimension can be either larger or smaller than the standard VC-dimension depending on the hypothesis class and adversary, making it an interesting object of study in its own right.
Researcher Affiliation Academia Daniel Cullina Princeton University dcullina@princeton.edu Arjun Nitin Bhagoji Princeton University abhagoji@princeton.edu Prateek Mittal Princeton University pmittal@princeton.edu
Pseudocode No The paper does not contain any pseudocode or algorithm blocks.
Open Source Code No The paper does not mention providing open-source code for the described methodology.
Open Datasets No The paper is theoretical and does not conduct experiments on datasets, so no dataset access information for training is provided.
Dataset Splits No The paper is theoretical and does not conduct experiments, so no training/validation/test dataset splits are specified.
Hardware Specification No The paper is theoretical and does not describe any experimental setup or hardware used.
Software Dependencies No The paper is theoretical and does not mention any software dependencies with specific version numbers.
Experiment Setup No The paper is theoretical and does not describe any experimental setup details like hyperparameters or training configurations.