Adversarial examples causing evasive predictions are widely used to evaluate and improve the robustness of machine learning models. However, current studies on adversarial examples focus on supervised learning tasks, relying on the ground-truth data label, a targeted objective, or supervision from a trained classifier. In this paper, we propose a framework of generating adversarial examples for unsupervised models and demonstrate novel applications to data augmentation. Our framework exploits a mutual information neural estimator as an information-theoretic similarity measure to generate adversarial examples without supervision. We propose a new MinMax algorithm with provable convergence guarantees for efficient generation of unsupervised adversarial examples. Our framework can also be extended to supervised adversarial examples. When using unsupervised adversarial examples as a simple plug-in data augmentation tool for model retraining, significant improvements are consistently observed across different unsupervised tasks and datasets, including data reconstruction, representation learning, and contrastive learning. Our results show novel methods and advantages in studying and improving robustness of unsupervised learning problems via adversarial examples. Our codes are available at https://github.com/IBM/UAE.

本研究提出一种生成无监督模型的对抗性示例的框架，使用相互信息神经估计器作为无监督信息理论相似度测量，建议使用此框架将对抗性样本作为简单的插入数据增强工具进行模型再训练，以大幅提高在不同无监督任务和数据集上的性能。

对抗样本可作为无监督机器学习的有效数据增强