Role of Optimizer on Network Fine-tuning for Adversarial Robustness (Student Abstract)

The solutions proposed in the literature for adversarial robustness are either not effective against the challenging gradient-based attacks or are computationally demanding, such as adversarial training. Adversarial training or network training based data augmentation shows the potential to increase the adversarial robustness. While the training seems compelling, it is not feasible for resource-constrained institutions, especially academia, to train the network from scratch multiple times. The two fold contributions are: (i) providing an effective solution against white-box adversarial attacks via network fine-tuning steps and (ii) observing the role of different optimizers towards robustness. Extensive experiments are performed on a range of databases, including Fashion-MNIST and a subset of ImageNet. It is found that the few steps of network fine-tuning effectively increases the robustness of both shallow and deep architectures. To know other interesting observations, especially regarding the role of the optimizer, refer to the paper.