LACMUS: latent concept masking for general robustness enhancement of DNNs

The susceptibility of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to adversarial attacks and their limited robustness to real-world variations pose substantial challenges to their widespread adoption. Adversarial training has shown promise in fortifying models against such perturbations, however current methods are often specific to a single type of attack and can significantly diminish the model's overall performance. In response, we present LAtent Concept Masking for robUStness (LACMUS), a novel perceptually-driven methodology that enhances DNN robustness without requiring prior knowledge about the adversarial contexts. We argue that DNNs' sensitivity to adversarial perturbations and distribution drifts stems from overfitting to non-common concepts within the dataset, leading to an over-reliance on specific learned instances and increased vulnerability. LACMUS addresses this by mapping high-dimensional data into a latent conceptual space to identify and navigate patterns of "non-common concepts"within the latent concept space. It then applies a concept masking strategy to selectively obscure data features, prompting the model to base its decisions on a wider array of information and thus enhancing its decision-making robustness. LACMUS distinguishes itself as a versatile, attack-agnostic framework that employs concept-wise augmentation to enhance robustness against a spectrum of adversarial, semantic, and distributional challenges. Our contributions include the development of a tool for robustness enhancement, a mechanism for mapping data to latent concept space, a strategy for identifying patterns of concept-wise misclassification, and a novel data augmentation module that leverages latent concepts. LACMUS is proven to enhance model resilience and generalization, even when training data is scarce, with experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CelebA supporting its effectiveness. We also provide augmented datasets to the research community, bolstering the robustness of models trained on them.