Papers › Efficient Robustness Certificates for Discrete Data: Sparsity-Aware Randomized...

Efficient Robustness Certificates for Discrete Data: Sparsity-Aware Randomized Smoothing for Graphs, Images and More

29 Aug 2020ICML 2020 1arXiv:2008.12952archive 2025-07-28

Aleksandar Bojchevski, Johannes Gasteiger, Stephan Günnemann

Existing techniques for certifying the robustness of models for discrete data either work only for a small class of models or are general at the expense of efficiency or tightness. Moreover, they do not account for sparsity in the input which, as our findings show, is often essential for obtaining non-trivial guarantees. We propose a model-agnostic certificate based on the randomized smoothing framework which subsumes earlier work and is tight, efficient, and sparsity-aware. Its computational complexity does not depend on the number of discrete categories or the dimension of the input (e.g. the graph size), making it highly scalable. We show the effectiveness of our approach on a wide variety of models, datasets, and tasks -- specifically highlighting its use for Graph Neural Networks. So far, obtaining provable guarantees for GNNs has been difficult due to the discrete and non-i.i.d. nature of graph data. Our method can certify any GNN and handles perturbations to both the graph structure and the node attributes.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

abojchevski/sparse_smoothing mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Randomized Smoothing

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections