# ScaleCert: Scalable Certified Defense against Adversarial Patches with Sparse Superficial Layers Source: [ScaleCert: Scalable Certified Defense against Adversarial Patches with Sparse Superficial Layers]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-12-24T16:07:43.281Z Authors: Husheng Han, Kaidi Xu, Xing Hu, Xiaobing Chen, Ling Liang, Zidong Du, Qi Guo, Yanzhi Wang, Yunji Chen Published: 2021-10-27T02:05:00.000Z ## Abstract Adversarial patch attacks that craft the pixels in a confined region of the input images show their powerful attack effectiveness in physical environments even with noises or deformations. Existing certified defenses towards adversarial patch attacks work well on small images like MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, but achieve very poor certified accuracy on higher-resolution images like ImageNet. It is urgent to design both robust and effective defenses against such a practical and harmful attack in industry-level larger images. In this work, we propose the certified defense methodology that achieves high provable robustness for high-resolution images and largely improves the practicality for real adoption of the certified defense. The basic insight of our work is that the adversarial patch intends to leverage localized superficial important neurons (SIN) to manipulate the prediction results. Hence, we leverage the SIN-based DNN compression techniques to significantly improve the certified accuracy, by reducing the adversarial region searching overhead and filtering the prediction noises. Our experimental results show that the certified accuracy is increased from 36.3% (the state-of-the-art certified detection) to 60.4% on the ImageNet dataset, largely pushing the certified defenses for practical use. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()