Learning Robust Deep Equilibrium Models

Deep equilibrium (DEQ) models have emerged as a promising class of implicit layer models in deep learning, which abandon traditional depth by solving for the fixed points of a single nonlinear layer. Despite their success, the stability of the fixed points for these models remains poorly understood. Recently, Lyapunov theory has been applied to Neural ODEs, another type of implicit layer model, to confer adversarial robustness. By considering DEQ models as nonlinear dynamic systems, we propose a robust DEQ model named LyaDEQ with guaranteed provable stability via Lyapunov theory. The crux of our method is ensuring the fixed points of the DEQ models are Lyapunov stable, which enables the LyaDEQ models to resist minor initial perturbations. To avoid poor adversarial defense due to Lyapunov-stable fixed points being located near each other, we add an orthogonal fully connected layer after the Lyapunov stability module to separate different fixed points. We evaluate LyaDEQ models on several widely used datasets under well-known adversarial attacks, and experimental results demonstrate significant improvement in robustness. Furthermore, we show that the LyaDEQ model can be combined with other defense methods, such as adversarial training, to achieve even better adversarial robustness.