Algorithms for Adversarially Robust Deep Learning
Published on arXiv
2509.19100
Input Manipulation Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01
Prompt Injection
OWASP LLM Top 10 — LLM01
Key Finding
Presents a unified thesis advancing adversarial robustness across three fronts: certified defenses for vision models, distributional-shift-resilient generalization, and both attack and defense algorithms for LLM jailbreaking.
Given the widespread use of deep learning models in safety-critical applications, ensuring that the decisions of such models are robust against adversarial exploitation is of fundamental importance. In this thesis, we discuss recent progress toward designing algorithms that exhibit desirable robustness properties. First, we discuss the problem of adversarial examples in computer vision, for which we introduce new technical results, training paradigms, and certification algorithms. Next, we consider the problem of domain generalization, wherein the task is to train neural networks to generalize from a family of training distributions to unseen test distributions. We present new algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art generalization in medical imaging, molecular identification, and image classification. Finally, we study the setting of jailbreaking large language models (LLMs), wherein an adversarial user attempts to design prompts that elicit objectionable content from an LLM. We propose new attacks and defenses, which represent the frontier of progress toward designing robust language-based agents.
Key Contributions
- New technical results, adversarial training paradigms, and certification algorithms for robustness against adversarial examples in computer vision
- State-of-the-art domain generalization algorithms for medical imaging, molecular identification, and image classification
- Novel LLM jailbreaking attacks and defenses representing the frontier of robust language-based agents
🛡️ Threat Analysis
The thesis introduces new adversarial example results, adversarial training paradigms, and certification algorithms for computer vision — directly targeting inference-time input manipulation attacks and their defenses.