cs.CVAug 7, 2026

Suppress and Diversify: Refining Robust Pathways for Corruption Robustness

Authors: Jiangang YangWenhui ShiXiaoran XuWenyue ChongLuqing LuoJing XingJian Liu

Organizations: Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Science, Beijing, China

Abstract

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.

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