Integer-arithmetic-only Certified Robustness for Quantized Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integer-only randomized smoothing method that enhances the efficiency of certified robustness in quantized neural networks, enabling deployment on resource-constrained edge devices with comparable accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel integer arithmetic-based randomized smoothing technique with proven robustness guarantees, suitable for deployment on integer-only hardware.

Findings

Achieves 4x-5x speedup over floating-point methods.

Maintains comparable accuracy on CIFAR-10 and Caltech-101.

Provides tight L2-norm robustness guarantees.

Abstract

Adversarial data examples have drawn significant attention from the machine learning and security communities. A line of work on tackling adversarial examples is certified robustness via randomized smoothing that can provide a theoretical robustness guarantee. However, such a mechanism usually uses floating-point arithmetic for calculations in inference and requires large memory footprints and daunting computational costs. These defensive models cannot run efficiently on edge devices nor be deployed on integer-only logical units such as Turing Tensor Cores or integer-only ARM processors. To overcome these challenges, we propose an integer randomized smoothing approach with quantization to convert any classifier into a new smoothed classifier, which uses integer-only arithmetic for certified robustness against adversarial perturbations. We prove a tight robustness guarantee under L2-norm for the proposed approach. We show our approach can obtain a comparable accuracy and 4x~5x speedup over floating-point arithmetic certified robust methods on general-purpose CPUs and mobile devices on two distinct datasets (CIFAR-10 and Caltech-101).