How robust accuracy suffers from certified training with convex
  relaxations
Piersilvio De Bartolomeis Jacob Clarysse Amartya Sanyal Fanny Yang
Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to deploying state-of-the-art
classifiers in safety-critical applications. Two classes of methods have
emerged to address this issue: empirical defences and certified defences.
Although certified defences come with robustness guarantees, empirical defences
such as adversarial training enjoy much higher popularity among practitioners.
In this paper, we systematically compare the standard and robust error of these
two robust training paradigms across multiple computer vision tasks. We show
that in most tasks and for both $\mathscr{l}_\infty$-ball and
$\mathscr{l}_2$-ball threat models, certified training with convex relaxations
suffers from worse standard and robust error than adversarial training. We
further explore how the error gap between certified and adversarial training
depends on the threat model and the data distribution. In particular, besides
the perturbation budget, we identify as important factors the shape of the
perturbation set and the implicit margin of the data distribution. We support
our arguments with extensive ablations on both synthetic and image datasets.