Training neural networks with verifiable robustness guarantees is
challenging. Several existing approaches utilize linear relaxation based neural
network output bounds under perturbation, but they can slow down training by a
factor of hundreds depending on the underlying network architectures.
Meanwhile, interval bound propagation (IBP) based training is efficient and
significantly outperforms linear relaxation based methods on many tasks, yet it
may suffer from stability issues since the bounds are much looser especially at
the beginning of training. In this paper, we propose a new certified
adversarial training method, CROWN-IBP, by combining the fast IBP bounds in a
forward bounding pass and a tight linear relaxation based bound, CROWN, in a
backward bounding pass. CROWN-IBP is computationally efficient and consistently
outperforms IBP baselines on training verifiably robust neural networks. We
conduct large scale experiments on MNIST and CIFAR datasets, and outperform all
previous linear relaxation and bound propagation based certified defenses in
$\ell_\infty$ robustness. Notably, we achieve 7.02% verified test error on
MNIST at $\epsilon=0.3$, and 66.94% on CIFAR-10 with $\epsilon=8/255$. Code is
available at https://github.com/deepmind/interval-bound-propagation
(TensorFlow) and https://github.com/huanzhang12/CROWN-IBP (PyTorch).