CIARD: Cyclic Iterative Adversarial Robustness Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu, Liming, Pang, Shuchao, Zheng, Xu, Gu, Xiang, Du, Anan, Liu, Yunhuai, Zhou, Yongbin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909790395957248
author Lu, Liming
Pang, Shuchao
Zheng, Xu
Gu, Xiang
Du, Anan
Liu, Yunhuai
Zhou, Yongbin
author_facet Lu, Liming
Pang, Shuchao
Zheng, Xu
Gu, Xiang
Du, Anan
Liu, Yunhuai
Zhou, Yongbin
contents Adversarial robustness distillation (ARD) aims to transfer both performance and robustness from teacher model to lightweight student model, enabling resilient performance on resource-constrained scenarios. Though existing ARD approaches enhance student model's robustness, the inevitable by-product leads to the degraded performance on clean examples. We summarize the causes of this problem inherent in existing methods with dual-teacher framework as: 1. The divergent optimization objectives of dual-teacher models, i.e., the clean and robust teachers, impede effective knowledge transfer to the student model, and 2. The iteratively generated adversarial examples during training lead to performance deterioration of the robust teacher model. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Cyclic Iterative ARD (CIARD) method with two key innovations: a. A multi-teacher framework with contrastive push-loss alignment to resolve conflicts in dual-teacher optimization objectives, and b. Continuous adversarial retraining to maintain dynamic teacher robustness against performance degradation from the varying adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate that CIARD achieves remarkable performance with an average 3.53 improvement in adversarial defense rates across various attack scenarios and a 5.87 increase in clean sample accuracy, establishing a new benchmark for balancing model robustness and generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/eminentgu/CIARD
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12633
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CIARD: Cyclic Iterative Adversarial Robustness Distillation
Lu, Liming
Pang, Shuchao
Zheng, Xu
Gu, Xiang
Du, Anan
Liu, Yunhuai
Zhou, Yongbin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Adversarial robustness distillation (ARD) aims to transfer both performance and robustness from teacher model to lightweight student model, enabling resilient performance on resource-constrained scenarios. Though existing ARD approaches enhance student model's robustness, the inevitable by-product leads to the degraded performance on clean examples. We summarize the causes of this problem inherent in existing methods with dual-teacher framework as: 1. The divergent optimization objectives of dual-teacher models, i.e., the clean and robust teachers, impede effective knowledge transfer to the student model, and 2. The iteratively generated adversarial examples during training lead to performance deterioration of the robust teacher model. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Cyclic Iterative ARD (CIARD) method with two key innovations: a. A multi-teacher framework with contrastive push-loss alignment to resolve conflicts in dual-teacher optimization objectives, and b. Continuous adversarial retraining to maintain dynamic teacher robustness against performance degradation from the varying adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate that CIARD achieves remarkable performance with an average 3.53 improvement in adversarial defense rates across various attack scenarios and a 5.87 increase in clean sample accuracy, establishing a new benchmark for balancing model robustness and generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/eminentgu/CIARD
title CIARD: Cyclic Iterative Adversarial Robustness Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12633