Paper ID: 2309.16207

Parameter-Saving Adversarial Training: Reinforcing Multi-Perturbation Robustness via Hypernetworks

Huihui Gong, Minjing Dong, Siqi Ma, Seyit Camtepe, Surya Nepal, Chang Xu

Adversarial training serves as one of the most popular and effective methods to defend against adversarial perturbations. However, most defense mechanisms only consider a single type of perturbation while various attack methods might be adopted to perform stronger adversarial attacks against the deployed model in real-world scenarios, e.g., $\ell_2$ or $\ell_\infty$. Defending against various attacks can be a challenging problem since multi-perturbation adversarial training and its variants only achieve suboptimal robustness trade-offs, due to the theoretical limit to multi-perturbation robustness for a single model. Besides, it is impractical to deploy large models in some storage-efficient scenarios. To settle down these drawbacks, in this paper we propose a novel multi-perturbation adversarial training framework, parameter-saving adversarial training (PSAT), to reinforce multi-perturbation robustness with an advantageous side effect of saving parameters, which leverages hypernetworks to train specialized models against a single perturbation and aggregate these specialized models to defend against multiple perturbations. Eventually, we extensively evaluate and compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art single/multi-perturbation robust methods against various latest attack methods on different datasets, showing the robustness superiority and parameter efficiency of our proposed method, e.g., for the CIFAR-10 dataset with ResNet-50 as the backbone, PSAT saves approximately 80\% of parameters with achieving the state-of-the-art robustness trade-off accuracy.

Submitted: Sep 28, 2023