  Noise injection-based method has been shown to be able to improve the
robustness of artificial neural networks in previous work. In this work, we
propose a novel noise injection-based training scheme for better model
robustness. Specifically, we first develop a likelihood ratio method to
estimate the gradient with respect to both synaptic weights and noise levels
for stochastic gradient descent training. Then, we design an approximation for
the vanilla noise injection-based training method to reduce memory and improve
computational efficiency. Next, we apply our proposed scheme to spiking neural
networks and evaluate the performance of classification accuracy and robustness
on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. Experiment results show that our proposed
method achieves a much better performance on adversarial robustness and
slightly better performance on original accuracy, compared with the
conventional gradient-based training method.
