Scaling Adversarial Training via Data Selection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ye, Youran, Wang, Dejin, Bhandare, Ajinkya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ye, Youran
Wang, Dejin
Bhandare, Ajinkya
author_facet Ye, Youran
Wang, Dejin
Bhandare, Ajinkya
contents Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is a strong and widely used first-order adversarial attack, yet its computational cost scales poorly, as all training samples undergo identical iterative inner-loop optimization despite contributing unequally to robustness. Motivated by this inefficiency, we propose \emph{Selective Adversarial Training}, which perturbs only a subset of critical samples in each minibatch. Specifically, we introduce two principled selection criteria: (1) margin-based sampling, which prioritizes samples near the decision boundary, and (2) gradient-matching sampling, which selects samples whose gradients align with the dominant batch optimization direction. Adversarial examples are generated only for the selected subset, while the remaining samples are trained cleanly using a mixed objective. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that the proposed methods achieve robustness comparable to, or even exceeding, full PGD adversarial training, while reducing adversarial computation by up to $50\%$, demonstrating that informed sample selection is sufficient for scalable adversarial robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_22069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Adversarial Training via Data Selection
Ye, Youran
Wang, Dejin
Bhandare, Ajinkya
Machine Learning
Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is a strong and widely used first-order adversarial attack, yet its computational cost scales poorly, as all training samples undergo identical iterative inner-loop optimization despite contributing unequally to robustness. Motivated by this inefficiency, we propose \emph{Selective Adversarial Training}, which perturbs only a subset of critical samples in each minibatch. Specifically, we introduce two principled selection criteria: (1) margin-based sampling, which prioritizes samples near the decision boundary, and (2) gradient-matching sampling, which selects samples whose gradients align with the dominant batch optimization direction. Adversarial examples are generated only for the selected subset, while the remaining samples are trained cleanly using a mixed objective. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that the proposed methods achieve robustness comparable to, or even exceeding, full PGD adversarial training, while reducing adversarial computation by up to $50\%$, demonstrating that informed sample selection is sufficient for scalable adversarial robustness.
title Scaling Adversarial Training via Data Selection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22069