Aug 2026· Neural Networks· Vol 205 Pt C, pp.
109521
· 0 citations· 51 references
Medicine
TL;DR
A novel energy-based optimization strategy to improve the robust generalization of machine learning models against adversarial attacks by incorporating the principles of energy-based models and shows strong and competitive performance across three extensively utilized datasets.
Abstract
Adversarial training has emerged as a leading strategy for enhancing the robustness of machine learning models against adversarial attacks. Its effectiveness often wanes when faced with unseen adversarial examples, resulting in suboptimal robust generalization. To address this issue, we introduce a novel energy-based optimization strategy to improve the robust generalization by incorporating the principles of energy-based models. Our framework models the energy of natural and adversarial examples, where natural samples are assigned to lower energy and adversarial samples to higher energy. During the inference phase, the influence of adversarial perturbation can be alleviated by energy minimization. Theoretically, we show that the proposed energy-based optimization strategy yields a tighter robust-generalization bound through an explicit energy-discrepancy term; this analysis provides an explanatory bound and should not be interpreted as certified robustness. Empirically, a series of evaluations provide evidence for the efficacy of the proposed methodology under the specified threat models and evaluation protocols, showing strong and competitive performance across three extensively utilized datasets. Specifically, EM-AT achieves 77.71% standard-AA robustness on CIFAR-10 and remains highly competitive under comparable lightweight settings. The source codes are available at https://github.com/LitterQ/EM-AT.
This work proposes BMAT (Bilevel-Minimax Adversarial Transfer), an integrated bottom-up solver that combines a Soft Weight Modulator and an Implicit Gradient Approximator to enable ternary coupling among initialization, surrogate adaptation, and perturbation optimization.
Adversarial training (AT) is a widely adopted defense against adversarial attacks, but its multi-step optimization process for generating adversarial examples leads to substantial computational overhead. To mitigate this, various single-step adversarial training methods have been proposed. However, these models often suffer from catastrophic overfitting under larger perturbations and exhibit degraded robustness. The core issue is that certain single-step adversarial examples, although successfully learned and correctly classified, fail to expose the true vulnerabilities of models. We refer to these misleading examples as “fakers”. Specifically, we find that fakers exhibit three distinct characteristics compared to standard adversarial examples: 1) they unexpectedly degrade the model robustness rather than improve it; 2) they make it harder for the model to learn their robust features; and 3) they show significantly greater divergence from their clean counterparts. These observations motivate us to proactively reduce the impact of fakers during training. To this end, we propose the Faker-Alleviating Single-step adversarial Training method (FAST), a general and effective framework designed to enhance both accuracy and robustness. Concretely, FAST consists of two main components. First, it dynamically adjusts the label-smoothing level for adversarial examples according to their learning difficulty, making fakers easier for the model to learn. Second, it introduces an auxiliary sample with a weak adversarial effect, derived from the single-step adversarial example, which is used to dynamically ease the alignment with clean data and stabilize the optimization process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FAST through extensive experiments, showing that our method achieves superior clean accuracy and robustness against various types of adversarial attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/mesunhlf/FAST.
Lifeng Huang, Yuquan Lin, Chen Wan et al.· IEEE Transactions on Informa...· 0 citations
Deep neural networks remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, and adversarial training (AT) has become a widely used approach for improving robustness. However, improvements in average robust accuracy often mask substantial class-wise disparities: while some classes become more robust, others may remain disproportionately vulnerable under attack. This imbalance raises an important adversarial fairness concern, particularly in vision tasks where reliable robustness is expected across all categories. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{RL-FAT}, a reinforcement-learning-inspired fair adversarial training framework that uses policy-gradient based feedback from adversarial predictions. RL-FAT interprets the prediction distribution as a policy and combines correctness-based prediction rewards with class-wise value estimates to compute class-specific advantages for policy-gradient optimization. This enables the model to adaptively focus on class-wise misclassification. Furthermore, we introduce a fairness-emphasis adversarial loss that assigns stronger training pressure to classes with high adversarial loss, thereby mitigating class-wise robustness disparity. By combining reinforcement-driven adaptation with fairness-emphasis regularization, RL-FAT improves adversarial robustness while promoting a more balanced robustness distribution across classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive robust accuracy and substantially reduces class-wise robustness imbalance compared with standard adversarial training baselines.
This work comprehensively investigates computation-efficient strategies to speed up latent adversarial training from two complementary perspectives, and reduces per-step adversarial-training FLOPs by 48.1% while requiring only 0.0118% trainable parameters.
The study systematically compares two distinct adversarial training strategies: ‘pre-train’, where adversarial examples are generated beforehand, and ‘in-train’, where perturbations are introduced dynamically during the training process, to understand the advantages and limitations of each approach in enhancing model robustness.
José María Jorquera Valero, Ibon Bengoechea Cazorla, Manuel Gil Pérez· IEEE Access· 0 citations
Adversarial attacks pose significant challenges to the security and robustness of deep-learning models. Stochastic neural networks (SNNs) have shown promising effectiveness in improving robustness by injecting stochastic noise into model activations, features, or weights. However, most existing SNN-based defenses rely on predefined distributional forms, such as Gaussian or Uniform. In real-world scenarios, data distributions are often non-Gaussian, skewed, or multimodal, which cannot be adequately captured by such fixed assumptions, thereby limiting the robustness of existing methods. To address this limitation, we propose a novel SNN named arbitrary distribution injection (ADI), which enables distribution modeling from nonpredefined, data-dependent distributions. In particular, we introduce a conditional stochastic feature mapping mechanism to model feature distributions, together with a theoretically grounded variance-regularization loss. Extensive experiments across diverse attack methods, datasets, modalities, and network architectures show that ADI achieves robustness improvements and promising generalization across the evaluated settings. Furthermore, detailed parameter analyses and feature-distribution visualizations provide deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms of ADI.
Rui Zhou, Hao Yang, Wen-Xu Wang et al.· IEEE Transactions on Neural...· 0 citations
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