Title: Towards Robust Neural Networks via Random Self-ensemble,
Abstract: Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of deep neural networks: A
small adversarial perturbation that is imperceptible to human can easily make a
well-trained deep neural network misclassify. This makes it unsafe to apply
neural networks in security-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a
new defense algorithm called Random Self-Ensemble (RSE) by combining two
important concepts: {\bf randomness} and {\bf ensemble}. To protect a targeted
model, RSE adds random noise layers to the neural network to prevent the strong
gradient-based attacks, and ensembles the prediction over random noises to
stabilize the performance. We show that our algorithm is equivalent to ensemble
an infinite number of noisy models $f_\epsilon$ without any additional memory
overhead, and the proposed training procedure based on noisy stochastic
gradient descent can ensure the ensemble model has a good predictive
capability. Our algorithm significantly outperforms previous defense techniques
on real data sets. For instance, on CIFAR-10 with VGG network (which has 92\%
accuracy without any attack), under the strong C\&W attack within a certain
distortion tolerance, the accuracy of unprotected model drops to less than
10\%, the best previous defense technique has $48\%$ accuracy, while our method
still has $86\%$ prediction accuracy under the same level of attack. Finally,
our method is simple and easy to integrate into any neural network.