AGAIN: Adversarial Training with Attribution Span Enlargement and Hybrid Feature Fusion

Abstract

The deep neural networks (DNNs) trained by adversarial training (AT) usually suffered from significant robust generalization gap, i.e., DNNs achieve high training robustness but low test robustness. In this paper, we propose a generic method to boost the robust generalization of AT methods from the novel perspective of attribution span. To this end, compared with standard DNNs, we discover that the generalization gap of adversarially trained DNNs is caused by the smaller attribution span on the input image. In other words, adversarially trained DNNs tend to focus on specific visual concepts on training images, causing its limitation on test robustness. In this way, to enhance the robustness, we propose an effective method to enlarge the learned attribution span. Besides, we use hybrid feature statistics for feature fusion to enrich the diversity of features. Extensive experiments show that our method can effectively improves robustness of adversarially trained DNNs, outperforming previous SOTA methods. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis of our method to prove its effectiveness.