Codes for this paper Data-Efficient Double-Win Lottery Tickets from Robust Pre-training [ICML 2022]

Tianlong Chen, Zhenyu Zhang, Sijia Liu, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang, Zhangyang Wang

Pre-training serves as a broadly adopted starting point for transfer learning on various downstream tasks. Recent investigations of lottery tickets hypothesis (LTH) demonstrate such enormous pre-trained models can be replaced by extremely sparse subnetworks (a.k.a. matching subnetworks) without sacrificing transferability.

However, practical security-crucial applications usually pose more challenging requirements beyond standard transfer, which also demand these subnetworks to overcome adversarial vulnerability. In this paper, we formulate a more rigorous concept, Double-Win Lottery Tickets, in which a located subnetwork from a pre-trained model can be independently transferred on diverse downstream tasks, to reach BOTH the same standard and robust generalization, under BOTH standard and adversarial training regimes, as the full pre-trained model can do. We comprehensively examine various pre-training mechanisms and find that robust pretraining tends to craft sparser double-win lottery tickets with superior performance over the standard counterparts.

Furthermore, we observe the obtained double-win lottery tickets can be more data-efficient to transfer, under practical data-limited (e.g., 1% and 10%) downstream schemes. Our results show that the benefits from robust pre-training are amplified by the lottery ticket scheme, as well as the data-limited transfer setting.

pytorch == 1.5.1
torchvision == 0.6.1
advertorch == 0.2.3

# IMP with adversarial training
bash script/imp_pretrain/imp_adv.sh [init-pretrained-weight] [save-direction] [data-direction]

# IMP with standard training
bash script/imp_pretrain/imp_std.sh [init-pretrained-weight] [save-direction] [data-direction]

# Adversarail training on CIFAR-10/100
bash script/train_downstream/adv_cifar.sh [dataset] [init-pretrained-weight] [save-direction] [located sparse structures]

# Adversarail training on SVHN
bash script/train_downstream/adv_svhn.sh [init-pretrained-weight] [save-direction] [located sparse structures]

# Standard training
bash script/std.sh [dataset] [init-pretrained-weight] [save-direction] [located sparse structures]

TBD