Stop Walking in Circles! Bailing Out Early in Projected Gradient Descent

Philip Doldo, Derek Everett, Amol Khanna, Andre T Nguyen, Edward Raff; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 6373-6382

Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) under the L_infinity ball has become one of the defacto methods used in adversarial robustness evaluation for computer vision (CV) due to its reliability and efficacy, making a strong and easy-to-implement iterative baseline. However, PGD is computationally demanding to apply, especially when thousands of iterations is current best-practice recommendations to generate an adversarial example for a single image. In this work, we introduce a simple novel method for early termination of PGD based on cycle detection by exploiting the geometry of how PGD is implemented in practice and show that it can produce large speedup factors while providing the exact same estimate of model robustness as standard PGD. This method substantially speeds up PGD without sacrificing any attack strength, enabling evaluations of robustness that were previously computationally intractable