# Utilizing Adversarial Targeted Attacks to Boost Adversarial Robustness

Source: [Utilizing Adversarial Targeted Attacks to Boost Adversarial Robustness](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6aaa1e209131cea29958>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:30:26.199Z

Authors: Uriya Pesso, Koby Bibas, Meir Feder

Published: 2021-09-04T22:30:49.000Z

## Abstract

Adversarial attacks have been shown to be highly effective at degrading the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs). The most prominent defense is adversarial training, a method for learning a robust model. Nevertheless, adversarial training does not make DNNs immune to adversarial perturbations. We propose a novel solution by adopting the recently suggested Predictive Normalized Maximum Likelihood. Specifically, our defense performs adversarial targeted attacks according to different hypotheses, where each hypothesis assumes a specific label for the test sample. Then, by comparing the hypothesis probabilities, we predict the label. Our refinement process corresponds to recent findings of the adversarial subspace properties. We extensively evaluate our approach on 16 adversarial attack benchmarks using ResNet-50, WideResNet-28, and a2-layer ConvNet trained with ImageNet, CIFAR10, and MNIST, showing a significant improvement of up to 5.7%, 3.7%, and 0.6% respectively.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01945>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01945.pdf>)
