Perturbation robustness evaluates the vulnerabilities of models, arising from a variety of perturbations, such as data corruptions and adversarial attacks. Understanding the mechanisms of perturbation robustness is critical for global interpretability. We present a model-agnostic, global mechanistic interpretability method to interpret the perturbation robustness of image models. This research is motivated by two key aspects. First, previous global interpretability works, in tandem with robustness benchmarks, e.g. mean corruption error (mCE), are not designed to directly interpret the mechanisms of perturbation robustness within image models. Second, we notice that the spectral signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of perturbed natural images exponentially decay over the frequency. This power-law-like decay implies that: Low-frequency signals are generally more robust than high-frequency signals -- yet high classification accuracy can not be achieved by low-frequency signals alone. By applying Shapley value theory, our method axiomatically quantifies the predictive powers of robust features and non-robust features within an information theory framework. Our method, dubbed as \textbf{I-ASIDE} (\textbf{I}mage \textbf{A}xiomatic \textbf{S}pectral \textbf{I}mportance \textbf{D}ecomposition \textbf{E}xplanation), provides a unique insight into model robustness mechanisms. We conduct extensive experiments over a variety of vision models pre-trained on ImageNet to show that \textbf{I-ASIDE} can not only \textbf{measure} the perturbation robustness but also \textbf{provide interpretations} of its mechanisms.
A vision foundation model outputs an embedding vector for an image, which can be affected by common editing operations (e.g., JPEG compression, brightness, contrast adjustments). These common perturbations alter embedding vectors and may impact the performance of downstream tasks using these embeddings. In this work, we present the first systematic study on foundation models' robustness to such perturbations. We propose three robustness metrics and formulate five desired mathematical properties for these metrics, analyzing which properties they satisfy or violate. Using these metrics, we evaluate six industry-scale foundation models (OpenAI, Meta) across nine common perturbation categories, finding them generally non-robust. We also show that common perturbations degrade downstream application performance (e.g., classification accuracy) and that robustness values can predict performance impacts. Finally, we propose a fine-tuning approach to improve robustness without sacrificing utility.
Model robustness against natural image corruptions is essential for safety-critical applications. While existing methods primarily focus on implicit representation learning, we provide the first systematic exploration of computational pathways to explicitly characterize internal robustness. We identify a progressive decay of robust features across network layers and establish a functional dependency between the prevalence of these features and model performance. To exploit these insights, we propose Suppress and Diversify (S&D), a non-intrusive refinement approach that enhances robustness by dynamically selecting robust pathways and diversifying them through symmetry-preserving transformations. S&D is architecture-agnostic, parameter-free, and incurs zero test-time overhead. Extensive evaluations across eight benchmarks demonstrate that S&D consistently improves performance across multiple vision tasks, diverse backbones, and complex real-world scenarios, highlighting its broad efficacy and scalability.
The robustness of deep neural networks is crucial for safety-critical deployments, yet existing evaluation methods are often attack-dependent and lack interpretability. We propose a principled, attack-agnostic robustness metric based on the spectral norm of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), which quantifies the worst-case sensitivity of the model's output distribution to input perturbations. Theoretically, we establish that the FIM equals the variance of the input Jacobian and derive closed-form spectral bounds for common architectures, including VGG, ResNet, DenseNet, and Transformer, providing the first theoretical robustness ranking. To enable scalable evaluation, we develop efficient algorithms, including power iteration and Hutchinson-based estimation, that support both white-box and black-box settings. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, including CIFAR, ImageNet, and medical images, and across multiple architectures show a strong correlation between our metric and adversarial vulnerability. Our framework serves as an interpretable diagnostic tool that complements attack-based evaluations, offering insights into architectural sensitivity and guiding the design of more robust models. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/SRP/.