This paper studies how encouraging semantically-aligned features during deep
neural network training can increase network robustness. Recent works observed
that Adversarial Training leads to robust models, whose learnt features appear
to correlate with human perception. Inspired by this connection from robustness
to semantics, we study the complementary connection: from semantics to
robustness. To do so, we provide a robustness certificate for distance-based
classification models (clustering-based classifiers). Moreover, we show that
this certificate is tight, and we leverage it to propose ClusTR (Clustering
Training for Robustness), a clustering-based and adversary-free training
framework to learn robust models. Interestingly, \textit{ClusTR} outperforms
adversarially-trained networks by up to $4\%$ under strong PGD attacks.