Robustness as Architecture: Designing IQA Models to Withstand Adversarial Perturbations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Meleshin, Igor, Chistyakova, Anna, Antsiferova, Anastasia, Vatolin, Dmitriy
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Meleshin, Igor
Chistyakova, Anna
Antsiferova, Anastasia
Vatolin, Dmitriy
author_facet Meleshin, Igor
Chistyakova, Anna
Antsiferova, Anastasia
Vatolin, Dmitriy
contents Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models are increasingly relied upon to evaluate image quality in real-world systems -- from compression and enhancement to generation and streaming. Yet their adoption brings a fundamental risk: these models are inherently unstable. Adversarial manipulations can easily fool them, inflating scores and undermining trust. Traditionally, such vulnerabilities are addressed through data-driven defenses -- adversarial retraining, regularization, or input purification. But what if this is the wrong lens? What if robustness in perceptual models is not something to learn but something to design? In this work, we propose a provocative idea: robustness as an architectural prior. Rather than training models to resist perturbations, we reshape their internal structure to suppress sensitivity from the ground up. We achieve this by enforcing orthogonal information flow, constraining the network to norm-preserving operations -- and further stabilizing the system through pruning and fine-tuning. The result is a robust IQA architecture that withstands adversarial attacks without requiring adversarial training or significant changes to the original model. This approach suggests a shift in perspective: from optimizing robustness through data to engineering it through design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04951
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robustness as Architecture: Designing IQA Models to Withstand Adversarial Perturbations
Meleshin, Igor
Chistyakova, Anna
Antsiferova, Anastasia
Vatolin, Dmitriy
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models are increasingly relied upon to evaluate image quality in real-world systems -- from compression and enhancement to generation and streaming. Yet their adoption brings a fundamental risk: these models are inherently unstable. Adversarial manipulations can easily fool them, inflating scores and undermining trust. Traditionally, such vulnerabilities are addressed through data-driven defenses -- adversarial retraining, regularization, or input purification. But what if this is the wrong lens? What if robustness in perceptual models is not something to learn but something to design? In this work, we propose a provocative idea: robustness as an architectural prior. Rather than training models to resist perturbations, we reshape their internal structure to suppress sensitivity from the ground up. We achieve this by enforcing orthogonal information flow, constraining the network to norm-preserving operations -- and further stabilizing the system through pruning and fine-tuning. The result is a robust IQA architecture that withstands adversarial attacks without requiring adversarial training or significant changes to the original model. This approach suggests a shift in perspective: from optimizing robustness through data to engineering it through design.
title Robustness as Architecture: Designing IQA Models to Withstand Adversarial Perturbations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04951