AR2: Attention-Guided Repair for the Robustness of CNNs Against Common Corruptions

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Fuyuan, Wang, Qichen, Zhao, Jianjun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Fuyuan
Wang, Qichen
Zhao, Jianjun
author_facet Zhang, Fuyuan
Wang, Qichen
Zhao, Jianjun
contents Deep neural networks suffer from significant performance degradation when exposed to common corruptions such as noise, blur, weather, and digital distortions, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose AR2 (Attention-Guided Repair for Robustness), a simple yet effective method to enhance the corruption robustness of pretrained CNNs. AR2 operates by explicitly aligning the class activation maps (CAMs) between clean and corrupted images, encouraging the model to maintain consistent attention even under input perturbations. Our approach follows an iterative repair strategy that alternates between CAM-guided refinement and standard fine-tuning, without requiring architectural changes. Extensive experiments show that AR2 consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in restoring robustness on standard corruption benchmarks (CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C and ImageNet-C), achieving a favorable balance between accuracy on clean data and corruption robustness. These results demonstrate that AR2 provides a robust and scalable solution for enhancing model reliability in real-world environments with diverse corruptions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06332
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AR2: Attention-Guided Repair for the Robustness of CNNs Against Common Corruptions
Zhang, Fuyuan
Wang, Qichen
Zhao, Jianjun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
Deep neural networks suffer from significant performance degradation when exposed to common corruptions such as noise, blur, weather, and digital distortions, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose AR2 (Attention-Guided Repair for Robustness), a simple yet effective method to enhance the corruption robustness of pretrained CNNs. AR2 operates by explicitly aligning the class activation maps (CAMs) between clean and corrupted images, encouraging the model to maintain consistent attention even under input perturbations. Our approach follows an iterative repair strategy that alternates between CAM-guided refinement and standard fine-tuning, without requiring architectural changes. Extensive experiments show that AR2 consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in restoring robustness on standard corruption benchmarks (CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C and ImageNet-C), achieving a favorable balance between accuracy on clean data and corruption robustness. These results demonstrate that AR2 provides a robust and scalable solution for enhancing model reliability in real-world environments with diverse corruptions.
title AR2: Attention-Guided Repair for the Robustness of CNNs Against Common Corruptions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06332