The fragility of modern machine learning models has drawn a considerable
amount of attention from both academia and the public. While immense interests
were in either crafting adversarial attacks as a way to measure the robustness
of neural networks or devising worst-case analytical robustness verification
with guarantees, few methods could enjoy both scalability and robustness
guarantees at the same time. As an alternative to these attempts, randomized
smoothing adopts a different prediction rule that enables statistical
robustness arguments which easily scale to large networks. However, in this
paper, we point out the side effects of current randomized smoothing workflows.
Specifically, we articulate and prove two major points: 1) the decision
boundaries of smoothed classifiers will shrink, resulting in disparity in
class-wise accuracy; 2) applying noise augmentation in the training process
does not necessarily resolve the shrinking issue due to the inconsistent
learning objectives.