Fast Adversarial Training with Smooth Convergence
Mengnan Zhao Lihe Zhang Yuqiu Kong Baocai Yin
Fast adversarial training (FAT) is beneficial for improving the adversarial
robustness of neural networks. However, previous FAT work has encountered a
significant issue known as catastrophic overfitting when dealing with large
perturbation budgets, \ie the adversarial robustness of models declines to near
zero during training.
  To address this, we analyze the training process of prior FAT work and
observe that catastrophic overfitting is accompanied by the appearance of loss
convergence outliers.
  Therefore, we argue a moderately smooth loss convergence process will be a
stable FAT process that solves catastrophic overfitting.
  To obtain a smooth loss convergence process, we propose a novel oscillatory
constraint (dubbed ConvergeSmooth) to limit the loss difference between
adjacent epochs. The convergence stride of ConvergeSmooth is introduced to
balance convergence and smoothing. Likewise, we design weight centralization
without introducing additional hyperparameters other than the loss balance
coefficient.
  Our proposed methods are attack-agnostic and thus can improve the training
stability of various FAT techniques.
  Extensive experiments on popular datasets show that the proposed methods
efficiently avoid catastrophic overfitting and outperform all previous FAT
methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/FAT-CS/ConvergeSmooth}.