Tengfei Shi
Author directory2026
CRICO: A Certified Robustness Framework via Input-Dependent Covariance Optimization
Shudi Guo | Bin Liu | Shihai Wang | Tengfei Shi | Yu Liu | Haoran Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shudi Guo | Bin Liu | Shihai Wang | Tengfei Shi | Yu Liu | Haoran Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Randomized smoothing provides certified robustness guarantees, but its direct application to text remains challenging due to the discrete, sparse, and semantically structured nature of textual inputs. We propose CRICO, an input-dependent covariance optimization framework for certified robustness in the text embedding space. CRICO estimates token-level decision influence in a black-box manner, making it readily extensible to LLMs. By adapting the certified ellipsoid to local decision structure, CRICO significantly enhances certified robustness. Experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate its effectiveness and broad applicability.