Revisiting Adversarial Training at Scale

Zeyu Wang, Xianhang Li, Hongru Zhu, Cihang Xie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 24675-24685

The machine learning community has witnessed a drastic change in the training pipeline pivoted by those "foundation models" with unprecedented scales. However the field of adversarial training is lagging behind predominantly centered around small model sizes like ResNet-50 and tiny and low-resolution datasets like CIFAR-10. To bridge this transformation gap this paper provides a modern re-examination with adversarial training investigating its potential benefits when applied at scale. Additionally we introduce an efficient and effective training strategy to enable adversarial training with giant models and web-scale data at an affordable computing cost. We denote this newly introduced framework as AdvXL. Empirical results demonstrate that AdvXL establishes new state-of-the-art robust accuracy records under AutoAttack on ImageNet-1K. For example by training on DataComp-1B dataset our AdvXL empowers a vanilla ViT-g model to substantially surpass the previous records of l_ infinity - l_ 2 - and l_ 1 -robust accuracy by margins of 11.4% 14.2% and 12.9% respectively. This achievement posits AdvXL as a pioneering approach charting a new trajectory for the efficient training of robust visual representations at significantly larger scales. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/AdvXL.