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Boosting Barely Robust Learners: A New Perspective on Adversarial Robustness

Machine Learning 2022-02-15 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We present an oracle-efficient algorithm for boosting the adversarial robustness of barely robust learners. Barely robust learning algorithms learn predictors that are adversarially robust only on a small fraction β1\beta \ll 1 of the data distribution. Our proposed notion of barely robust learning requires robustness with respect to a "larger" perturbation set; which we show is necessary for strongly robust learning, and that weaker relaxations are not sufficient for strongly robust learning. Our results reveal a qualitative and quantitative equivalence between two seemingly unrelated problems: strongly robust learning and barely robust learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.05920,
  title  = {Boosting Barely Robust Learners: A New Perspective on Adversarial Robustness},
  author = {Avrim Blum and Omar Montasser and Greg Shakhnarovich and Hongyang Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.05920},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:32:55.199Z