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Autori principali: Cao, Ying, Yuan, Kun, Sayed, Ali H.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11337
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author Cao, Ying
Yuan, Kun
Sayed, Ali H.
author_facet Cao, Ying
Yuan, Kun
Sayed, Ali H.
contents Adversarial training has been widely studied in recent years due to its role in improving model robustness against adversarial attacks. This paper focuses on comparing different distributed adversarial training algorithms--including centralized and decentralized strategies--within multi-agent learning environments. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of model flatness in determining robustness. To this end, we develop a general theoretical framework to study the escaping efficiency of these algorithms from local minima, which is closely related to the flatness of the resulting models. We show that when the perturbation bound is sufficiently small (i.e., when the attack strength is relatively mild) and a large batch size is used, decentralized adversarial training algorithms--including consensus and diffusion--are guaranteed to escape faster from local minima than the centralized strategy, thereby favoring flatter minima. However, as the perturbation bound increases, this trend may no longer hold. In the simulation results, we illustrate our theoretical findings and systematically compare the performance of models obtained through decentralized and centralized adversarial training algorithms. The results highlight the potential of decentralized strategies to enhance the robustness of models in distributed settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_11337
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Escaping Efficiency of Distributed Adversarial Training Algorithms
Cao, Ying
Yuan, Kun
Sayed, Ali H.
Machine Learning
Adversarial training has been widely studied in recent years due to its role in improving model robustness against adversarial attacks. This paper focuses on comparing different distributed adversarial training algorithms--including centralized and decentralized strategies--within multi-agent learning environments. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of model flatness in determining robustness. To this end, we develop a general theoretical framework to study the escaping efficiency of these algorithms from local minima, which is closely related to the flatness of the resulting models. We show that when the perturbation bound is sufficiently small (i.e., when the attack strength is relatively mild) and a large batch size is used, decentralized adversarial training algorithms--including consensus and diffusion--are guaranteed to escape faster from local minima than the centralized strategy, thereby favoring flatter minima. However, as the perturbation bound increases, this trend may no longer hold. In the simulation results, we illustrate our theoretical findings and systematically compare the performance of models obtained through decentralized and centralized adversarial training algorithms. The results highlight the potential of decentralized strategies to enhance the robustness of models in distributed settings.
title On the Escaping Efficiency of Distributed Adversarial Training Algorithms
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11337