Improving Adversarial Robustness Through Adaptive Learning-Driven Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ullah, Hayat, Zaidi, Syed Muhammad Talha, Munir, Arslan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ullah, Hayat
Zaidi, Syed Muhammad Talha
Munir, Arslan
author_facet Ullah, Hayat
Zaidi, Syed Muhammad Talha
Munir, Arslan
contents Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel in computer vision but are susceptible to adversarial attacks, crafted perturbations designed to mislead predictions. Despite advances in adversarial training, a gap persists between model accuracy and robustness. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we present a multi-teacher adversarial robustness distillation using an adaptive learning strategy. Specifically, our proposed method first trained multiple clones of a baseline CNN model using an adversarial training strategy on a pool of perturbed data acquired through different adversarial attacks. Once trained, these adversarially trained models are used as teacher models to supervise the learning of a student model on clean data using multi-teacher knowledge distillation. To ensure an effective robustness distillation, we design an adaptive learning strategy that controls the knowledge contribution of each model by assigning weights as per their prediction precision. Distilling knowledge from adversarially pre-trained teacher models not only enhances the learning capabilities of the student model but also empowers it with the capacity to withstand different adversarial attacks, despite having no exposure to adversarial data. To verify our claims, we extensively evaluated our proposed method on MNIST-Digits and Fashion-MNIST datasets across diverse experimental settings. The obtained results exhibit the efficacy of our multi-teacher adversarial distillation and adaptive learning strategy, enhancing CNNs' adversarial robustness against various adversarial attacks.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20996
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Adversarial Robustness Through Adaptive Learning-Driven Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation
Ullah, Hayat
Zaidi, Syed Muhammad Talha
Munir, Arslan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel in computer vision but are susceptible to adversarial attacks, crafted perturbations designed to mislead predictions. Despite advances in adversarial training, a gap persists between model accuracy and robustness. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we present a multi-teacher adversarial robustness distillation using an adaptive learning strategy. Specifically, our proposed method first trained multiple clones of a baseline CNN model using an adversarial training strategy on a pool of perturbed data acquired through different adversarial attacks. Once trained, these adversarially trained models are used as teacher models to supervise the learning of a student model on clean data using multi-teacher knowledge distillation. To ensure an effective robustness distillation, we design an adaptive learning strategy that controls the knowledge contribution of each model by assigning weights as per their prediction precision. Distilling knowledge from adversarially pre-trained teacher models not only enhances the learning capabilities of the student model but also empowers it with the capacity to withstand different adversarial attacks, despite having no exposure to adversarial data. To verify our claims, we extensively evaluated our proposed method on MNIST-Digits and Fashion-MNIST datasets across diverse experimental settings. The obtained results exhibit the efficacy of our multi-teacher adversarial distillation and adaptive learning strategy, enhancing CNNs' adversarial robustness against various adversarial attacks.
title Improving Adversarial Robustness Through Adaptive Learning-Driven Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20996