UNDERSTANDING THE LIMITATIONS OF CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE MODELS

Ethan Fetaya, Jörn Henrik Jacobsen, Will Grathwohl, Richard Zemel

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Class-conditional generative models hold promise to overcome the shortcomings of their discriminative counterparts. They are a natural choice to solve discriminative tasks in a robust manner as they jointly optimize for predictive performance and accurate modeling of the input distribution. In this work, we investigate robust classification with likelihood-based generative models from a theoretical and practical perspective to investigate if they can deliver on their promises. Our analysis focuses on a spectrum of robustness properties: (1) Detection of worst-case outliers in the form of adversarial examples; (2) Detection of average-case outliers in the form of ambiguous inputs and (3) Detection of incorrectly labeled in-distribution inputs. Our theoretical result reveals that it is impossible to guarantee detectability of adversarially-perturbed inputs even for near-optimal generative classifiers. Experimentally, we find that while we are able to train robust models for MNIST, robustness completely breaks down on CIFAR10. We relate this failure to various undesirable model properties that can be traced to the maximum likelihood training objective. Despite being a common choice in the literature, our results indicate that likelihood-based conditional generative models may are surprisingly ineffective for robust classification.

Original languageEnglish
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020 - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Duration: 30 Apr 2020 → …

Conference

Conference8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020
Country/TerritoryEthiopia
CityAddis Ababa
Period30/04/20 → …

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020. All rights reserved.

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