Dynamic Divide-and-Conquer Adversarial Training for Robust Semantic Segmentation

Xiaogang Xu, Hengshuang Zhao, Jiaya Jia; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 7486-7495

Adversarial training is promising for improving robustness of deep neural networks towards adversarial perturbations, especially on the classification task. The effect of this type of training on semantic segmentation, contrarily, just commences. We make the initial attempt to explore the defense strategy on semantic segmentation by formulating a general adversarial training procedure that can perform decently on both adversarial and clean samples. We propose a dynamic divide-and-conquer adversarial training (DDC-AT) strategy to enhance the defense effect, by setting additional branches in the target model during training, and dealing with pixels with diverse properties towards adversarial perturbation. Our dynamical division mechanism divides pixels into multiple branches automatically. Note all these additional branches can be abandoned during inference and thus leave no extra parameter and computation cost. Extensive experiments with various segmentation models are conducted on PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets, in which DDC-AT yields satisfying performance under both white- and black-box attack. The code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Robust-Semantic-Segmentation.