A Hybrid Bayesian-Convolutional Neural Network for Adversarial Robustness

We introduce a hybrid Bayesian-convolutional neural network (hyBCNN) for improving the robustness against adversarial attacks and decreasing the computation time in the Bayesian inference phase. Our hyBCNN models are built from a part of BNN and CNN. Based on pre-trained CNNs, we only replace convolutional layers and activation function of the initial stage of CNNs with our Bayesian convolutional (BC) and Bayesian activation (BA) layers as a term of transfer learning. We keep the remainder of CNNs unchanged. We adopt the Bayes without Bayesian Learning (BwoBL) algorithm for hyBCNN networks to execute Bayesian inference towards adversarial robustness. Our proposal outperforms adversarial training and robust activation function, which are currently the outstanding defense methods of CNNs in the resistance to adversarial attacks such as PGD and C&W. Moreover, the proposed architecture with BwoBL can easily integrate into any pre-trained CNN, especially in scaling networks, e.g., ResNet and EfficientNet, with better performance on large-scale datasets. In particular, under l∞ norm PGD attack of pixel perturbation ε=4/255 with 100 iterations on ImageNet, our best hyBCNN EfficientNet reaches 93.92% top-5 accuracy without additional training.