In-Time Refining Optimization Trajectories Toward Improved Robust Generalization

Tianjin Huang, Shiwei Liu, Tianlong Chen, Meng Fang, Li Shen, Vlado Menkovski, Lu Yin, Yulong Pei, Mykola Pechenizkiy

Keywords: Adversarial Robustness, Optimization Trajectories, Robust overfitting

TL;DR: We propose a new method named weighted optimization trajectories (WOT) that refines the optimization trajectories of adversarial training in time to improve robust generalization.

Abstract: Despite the fact that adversarial training has become the de facto method for improving robustness of deep neural networks, it is well-known that vanilla adversarial training suffers from daunting robust overfitting, resulting in unsatisfactory robust generalization. A number of approaches have been proposed to address these drawbacks such as extra regularization, adversarial weights perturbation, and training with more data over the last few years. However, the robust generalization improvement is yet far from satisfactory. In this paper, we approach this challenge with a brand new perspective -- refining historical optimization trajectories. We propose a new method named \textbf{Weighted Optimization Trajectories (WOT)} that leverages the optimization trajectories of adversarial training in time. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of WOT under various state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. Our results show that WOT integrates seamlessly with the existing adversarial training methods and consistently overcomes the robust overfitting issue, resulting in better adversarial robustness. For example, WOT boosts the robust accuracy of AT-PGD under AA-$L_{\infty}$ attack by 1.53\% $\sim$ 6.11\% and meanwhile increases the clean accuracy by 0.55\%$\sim$5.47\% across SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. Codes are included in the supplementary.

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