Consistency Purification: Effective and Efficient Diffusion Purification towards Certified Robustness

Diffusion Purification, purifying noised images with diffusion models, has been widely used for enhancing certified robustness via randomized smoothing. However, existing frameworks often grapple with the balance between efficiency and effectiveness. While the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) offers an efficient single-step purification, it falls short in ensuring purified images reside on the data manifold. Conversely, the Stochastic Diffusion Model effectively places purified images on the data manifold but demands solving cumbersome stochastic differential equations, while its derivative, the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (PF-ODE), though solving simpler ordinary differential equations, still requires multiple computational steps. In this work, we demonstrated that an ideal purification pipeline should generate the purified images on the data manifold that are as much semantically aligned to the original images for effectiveness in one step for efficiency. Therefore, we introduced Consistency Purification, an efficiency-effectiveness Pareto superior purifier compared to the previous work. Consistency Purification employs the consistency model, a one-step generative model distilled from PF-ODE, thus can generate on-manifold purified images with a single network evaluation. However, the consistency model is designed not for purification thus it does not inherently ensure semantic alignment between purified and original images. To resolve this issue, we further refine it through Consistency Fine-tuning with LPIPS loss, which enables more aligned semantic meaning while keeping the purified images on data manifold. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our Consistency Purification framework achieves state-of the-art certified robustness and efficiency compared to baseline methods.

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Peer review

Reviewer aFWW5/10 · confidence 3/52024-06-26

Summary

This paper presents an innovative approach to image purification using diffusion models, known as Consistency Purification. Traditional methods like the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) and the Stochastic Diffusion Model face challenges in balancing efficiency and effectiveness. While DDPM provides efficient purification, it fails to ensure that purified images lie on the data manifold. On the other hand, the Stochastic Diffusion Model successfully places images on the data manifold but is computationally intensive. The proposed Consistency Purification leverages a consistency model distilled from the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (PF-ODE), achieving on-manifold purification in a single step. This approach is further refined through Consistency Fine-tuning with LPIPS loss, enhancing semantic alignment between purified and original images. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that this framework achieves state-of-the-art certified robustness and efficiency compared to baseline methods.

Strengths

1. Introducing the consistency model to the purification domain is an interesting idea, because it utilizes the consistency model's feature that maps noised images back to origin. , and experimental results show significant improvements in classification efficiency. 2. The writing and logical flow are clear and well-structured.

Weaknesses

1. There is no comparison with multi-step DDPM methods. Providing these results and the corresponding speedup would make the work more solid. 2. The impact of noise intensity on experimental results is not mentioned. Could you please show this in the rebuttal phase? 3. It is unclear how the model performs if the noise is not Gaussian. Providing results for different noise distributions would enhance the robustness and applicability of the method. 4. Including visualizations of the purified images before and after the purification process would make the results more intuitive and compelling.

Questions

refer to weakness

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

refer to weakness

Reviewer wtha5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-11

Summary

The paper introduces the Consistency Model for one-step purification, ensuring the data manifold of the purified samples while maintaining the efficiency of one-step purification. At the same time, the paper proposes Consistency Finetuning to fine tune the Consistency Model to ensure semantic consistency of the purified samples.

Strengths

1. The paper achieves a trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness, realizing Consistency Purification in a one-step manner. 2. The author conductes both theoretical and experimental verification of the proposed method. 3. The paper achieves consistent performance improvement in the experiment.

Weaknesses

1. The paper's innovation is limited, using existing Consistency Models and LPIPS loss to form the diffpure framework. 2. There are some descriptions not easy to understand. Suggest the author to provide a brief explanation and clarification when transport (Page 3, line 77) first appears in the Introduction. Does Remark 3.4 (line202) need to be bolded? 3. The paper's validation set on ImageNet-64 is too small, and 100 images are difficult to accurately reflect its validity. Meanwhile, one of the purposes of this paper is to enhance the effectiveness, but the experimental dataset does not align with this original intention.

Questions

1. In Example 3.1, the author states in lines 177-178 that if distribution consistency is already being ensured, it should already be a relatively strong constraint. Why can only ensure generation and not enough for denoising? 2. The paper's statements in 188-191 and the proof in Theorem 3.3 demonstrate the importance of small transport. However, the ideal denoising should be to transform d into x. For a defined transport, it is natural and reasonable to require it to be small. What the author needs to prove more is whether this Gaussian transport lower can be transferred to adversarial attacks, rather than just proving that lower is good?

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

The paper has addressed the limitations.

Reviewer 43Xy5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

This paper introduces Consistency Purification, a novel framework that integrates consistency models with diffusion purification to enhance the certified robustness of deep neural networks, achieving efficient and effective image purification. The framework is further refined through Consistency Fine-tuning with LPIPS loss to ensure semantic alignment between the original and purified images, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in both certified robustness and efficiency compared to existing methods.

Strengths

The motivation is agreeable, and the paper is well-structured. Theoretical explanations on the advantages of Consistency Purification are provided and clearly written.

Weaknesses

It's noteworthy that there have been non-diffusion-based prior studies for enhancing certified robustness. A comparative analysis with those works would add depth to this study. The experimental setting, including baseline selection and the selection of evaluation data, is not consistent with the baseline method One-Step DDPM. In this paper, only 100 samples from ImageNet are selected for evaluation. It would be beneficial to evaluate the method across multiple benchmarks and with more test samples.

Questions

See Weakness.

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

None

Reviewer wtha2024-08-08

Thank you for your detailed response. Regarding the model evaluation using a subset of 500 images, it is better to use 512 images for evaluation to align with many diffusion purification settings ( "Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification" and "Robust Evaluation of Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification"). I appreciate your detailed explanation of the contribution, and the rating has been adjusted accordingly.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

Response to your valuable feedback

Thank you for your response! We have expanded the 500 test images to 512 for evaluation to align with common diffusion purification settings ('Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification' and 'Robust Evaluation of Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification'). The results in the following table show that consistency purification with consistency fine-tuning, consistently achieves the highest certified accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. | | 0.0 | 0.05 | 0.15 | 0.25 | 0.35 | |----|----|----|----|----|----| | onestep-DDPM | 55.3 | 44.7 | 33.4 | 15.2 | 8.8 | | Consistency Purification | 62.3 | 54.3 | 35.2 | 19.7 | 13.1 | | + Consistency Fine-tuning | **68.8** | **58.0** | **37.5** | **23.4** | **17.4** |

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

Look forward to your reply

Dear Reviewer 43Xy, The deadline for the discussion period is approaching. We have provided our rebuttal material and hopefully could address your concerns. Your feedback is highly valuable to us, and we would greatly appreciate it if you could take some time to review our response. Best Regards, Authors

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

Look forward to your reply

Dear Reviewer aFWW, The deadline for the discussion period is approaching. We have provided our rebuttal material and hopefully could address your concerns. Your feedback is highly valuable to us, and we would greatly appreciate it if you could take some time to review our response. Best Regards, Authors

Reviewer 43Xy2024-08-14

I understand the authors’ response and efforts, i keep my rating.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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