DART: A Principled Approach to Adversarially Robust Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this work, we consider a setting where the goal is to achieve adversarial robustness on a target task, given only unlabeled training data from the task distribution <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{D}_{T}$</tex>, by leveraging a labeled training data from a different yet related source task distribution <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{D}_{S}$</tex>. The absence of the labels on training data for the target task poses a unique challenge as conventional adversarial robustness defenses cannot be directly applied. To address this challenge, we first bound the adversarial population 0–1 robust loss on the target task in terms of (i) empirical 0–1 loss on the source task, (ii) joint loss on source and target tasks of an ideal classifier, and (iii) a measure of worst-case domain divergence. Motivated by this bound, we develop a novel unified defense framework called Divergence-Aware adveRsarial Training (DART), which can be used in conjunction with a variety of standard UDA methods; e.g., DANN [Ganin and Lempitsky, 2015]. DART is applicable to general threat models, including the popular <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\ell_{p}$</tex> -norm model, and does not require heuristic regularizers or architectural changes. We also release DomainRobust, a testbed for evaluating robustness of UDA models to adversarial attacks. DomainRobust consists of 4 multi-domain benchmark datasets (with 46 source-target pairs) and 7 meta-algorithms with a total of 11 variants. Our large-scale experiments demonstrate that, on average, DART significantly enhances model robustness on all benchmarks compared to the state of the art, while maintaining competitive standard accuracy. The relative improvement in robustness from DART reaches up to 29.2% on the source-target domain pairs considered.