We propose a new approach to train a variational information bottleneck (VIB) that improves its robustness to adversarial perturbations. Unlike the traditional methods where the hard labels are usually used for the classification task, we refine the
categorical class information in the training phase with soft labels which are obtained from a pre-trained reference neural network and can reflect the likelihood of the original class labels. We also relax the Gaussian posterior assumption in the VIB implementation by using the mutual information neural estimation. Extensive experiments have been performed with the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, and the results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the benchmarked models.
Multi-task learning (MTL) is an important subject in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Its applications to computer vision, signal processing, and speech recognition are ubiquitous. Although this subject has attracted considerable attenti
on recently, the performance and robustness of the existing models to different tasks have not been well balanced. This article proposes an MTL model based on the architecture of the variational information bottleneck (VIB), which can provide a more effective latent representation of the input features for the downstream tasks. Extensive observations on three public data sets under adversarial attacks show that the proposed model is competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms concerning the prediction accuracy. Experimental results suggest that combining the VIB and the task-dependent uncertainties is a very effective way to abstract valid information from the input features for accomplishing multiple tasks.
