Push Stricter to Decide Better: A Class-Conditional Feature Adaptive Framework for Improving Adversarial Robustness

In response to the threat of adversarial examples, adversarial training provides an attractive option for improving robustness by training models on online-augmented adversarial examples. However, most existing adversarial training methods focus on improving the model’s robust accuracy by strengthening the adversarial examples but neglecting the increasing shift between natural data and adversarial examples, leading to a decrease in natural accuracy. To maintain the trade-off between natural and robust accuracy, we alleviate the shift from the perspective of feature adaption and propose a Feature Adaptive Adversarial Training (FAAT) optimizing the class-conditional feature adaption across natural data and adversarial examples. Specifically, we propose to incorporate a class-conditional discriminator to encourage the features to become
(1)
class-discriminative and
(2)
invariant to the change of adversarial attacks. The novel FAAT framework enables the trade-off between natural and robust accuracy by generating features with similar distribution across natural and adversarial data within the same class and achieves higher overall robustness benefiting from the class-discriminative feature characteristics. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that FAAT produces more discriminative features and performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.