Fast Propagation is Better: Accelerating Single-Step Adversarial
  Training via Sampling Subnetworks
Xiaojun Jia Jianshu Li Jindong Gu Yang Bai Xiaochun Cao
Adversarial training has shown promise in building robust models against
adversarial examples. A major drawback of adversarial training is the
computational overhead introduced by the generation of adversarial examples. To
overcome this limitation, adversarial training based on single-step attacks has
been explored. Previous work improves the single-step adversarial training from
different perspectives, e.g., sample initialization, loss regularization, and
training strategy. Almost all of them treat the underlying model as a black
box. In this work, we propose to exploit the interior building blocks of the
model to improve efficiency. Specifically, we propose to dynamically sample
lightweight subnetworks as a surrogate model during training. By doing this,
both the forward and backward passes can be accelerated for efficient
adversarial training. Besides, we provide theoretical analysis to show the
model robustness can be improved by the single-step adversarial training with
sampled subnetworks. Furthermore, we propose a novel sampling strategy where
the sampling varies from layer to layer and from iteration to iteration.
Compared with previous methods, our method not only reduces the training cost
but also achieves better model robustness. Evaluations on a series of popular
datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FB-Better. Our code has
been released at https://github.com/jiaxiaojunQAQ/FP-Better.