DAC-LoRA: Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum for Efficient and Robust Few-Shot Adaptation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Umrajkar, Ved
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Umrajkar, Ved
author_facet Umrajkar, Ved
contents Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are foundational to critical applications like autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, and content moderation. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA enable their efficient adaptation to specialized tasks, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can compromise safety-critical decisions. CLIP, the backbone for numerous downstream VLMs, is a high-value target whose vulnerabilities can cascade across the multimodal AI ecosystem. We propose Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum DAC-LoRA, a novel framework that integrates adversarial training into PEFT. The core principle of our method i.e. an intelligent curriculum of progressively challenging attack, is general and can potentially be applied to any iterative attack method. Guided by the First-Order Stationary Condition (FOSC) and a TRADES-inspired loss, DAC-LoRA achieves substantial improvements in adversarial robustness without significantly compromising clean accuracy. Our work presents an effective, lightweight, and broadly applicable method to demonstrate that the DAC-LoRA framework can be easily integrated into a standard PEFT pipeline to significantly enhance robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DAC-LoRA: Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum for Efficient and Robust Few-Shot Adaptation
Umrajkar, Ved
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are foundational to critical applications like autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, and content moderation. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA enable their efficient adaptation to specialized tasks, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can compromise safety-critical decisions. CLIP, the backbone for numerous downstream VLMs, is a high-value target whose vulnerabilities can cascade across the multimodal AI ecosystem. We propose Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum DAC-LoRA, a novel framework that integrates adversarial training into PEFT. The core principle of our method i.e. an intelligent curriculum of progressively challenging attack, is general and can potentially be applied to any iterative attack method. Guided by the First-Order Stationary Condition (FOSC) and a TRADES-inspired loss, DAC-LoRA achieves substantial improvements in adversarial robustness without significantly compromising clean accuracy. Our work presents an effective, lightweight, and broadly applicable method to demonstrate that the DAC-LoRA framework can be easily integrated into a standard PEFT pipeline to significantly enhance robustness.
title DAC-LoRA: Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum for Efficient and Robust Few-Shot Adaptation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20792