Entry 29 of 44
Robust
robustus — hard, firm, strong as oak; robur (oak, strength)
Latin
From Latin robustus: as strong as oak. From robur: oak tree, hardness, strength. Root concept: structural integrity under stress — strength that holds under load, not merely under favorable conditions.
Established meaning
In engineering and statistics: performing reliably under a wide range of conditions, including adverse ones. A robust system maintains function when conditions deviate from design parameters. Robustness is tested by failure conditions, not success conditions.
AI industry deployment
'Robust safety measures,' 'robust performance.' Applied to systems that perform well on benchmarks. Adversarial robustness — maintaining safety properties under deliberate attack — is a separately measured and often weaker property than benchmark performance suggests.
Semantic gap
Performance under adversarial conditions
Robur — oak strength — holds under the storm, not just in calm weather. Benchmark robustness tested under non-adversarial conditions is not robustness in the engineering sense the word imports.