Verification of neural networks enables us to gauge their robustness against adversarial attacks. Verification algorithms fall into two categories: exact verifiers that run in exponential time and relaxed verifiers that are efficient but incomplete. In this paper, we unify all existing LP-relaxed verifiers, to the best of our knowledge, under a general convex relaxation framework. This framework works for neural networks with diverse architectures and nonlinearities and covers both primal and dual views of robust verification. We further prove strong duality between the primal and dual problems under very mild conditions. Next, we perform large-scale experiments, amounting to more than 22 CPU-years, to obtain exact solution to the convex-relaxed problem that is optimal within our framework for ReLU networks. We find the exact solution does not significantly improve upon the gap between PGD and existing relaxed verifiers for various networks trained normally or robustly on MNIST and CIFAR datasets. Our results suggest there is an inherent barrier to tight verification for the large class of methods captured by our framework. We discuss possible causes of this barrier and potential future directions for bypassing it.

本文介绍一种基于凸松弛框架的神经网络强鲁棒性验证算法，通过大量实验发现该算法在已有松弛算法上并没有显著提高，提示了一类算法具有固有的严格验证难度。

神经网络紧致鲁棒性验证的凸松弛屏障