Title
On the Adversarial Robustness of Robust Estimators
Abstract
Motivated by recent data analytics applications, we study the adversarial robustness of robust estimators. Instead of assuming that only a fraction of the data points are outliers as considered in the classic robust estimation setup, in this paper, we consider an adversarial setup in which an attacker can observe the whole dataset and can modify all data samples in an adversarial manner so as to maximize the estimation error caused by his attack. We characterize the attacker's optimal attack strategy, and further introduce adversarial influence function (AIF) to quantify an estimator's sensitivity to such adversarial attacks. We provide an approach to characterize AIF for any given robust estimator, and then design optimal estimator that minimizes AIF, which implies it is least sensitive to adversarial attacks and hence is most robust against adversarial attacks. From this characterization, we identify a tradeoff between AIF (i.e., robustness against adversarial attack) and influence function, a quantity used in classic robust estimators to measure robustness against outliers, and design estimators that strike a desirable tradeoff between these two quantities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TIT.2020.2985966
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Robust estimators,adversarial robustness,M-estimator,non-convex optimization
Journal
66
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
0018-9448
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lifeng Lai12289167.78
Erhan Bayraktar216245.49