Local-contrastive-learning machine with both generalization and adversarial robustness: A statistical physics analysis

Distinct from human cognitive processing, deep neural networks trained by backpropagation can be easily fooled by adversarial examples. To design a semantically meaningful representation learning, we discard backpropagation, and instead, propose a local contrastive learning, where the representations for the inputs bearing the same label shrink (akin to boson) in hidden layers, while those of different labels repel (akin to fermion). This layer-wise learning is local in nature, being biologically plausible. A statistical mechanics analysis shows that the target fermion-pair-distance is a key parameter. Moreover, the application of this local contrastive learning to MNIST benchmark dataset demonstrates that the adversarial vulnerability of standard perceptron can be greatly mitigated by tuning the target distance, i.e., controlling the geometric separation of prototype manifolds.