RegMix: Adversarial Mutual and Generalization Regularization for Enhancing DNN Robustness
Published on arXiv
2510.05317
Input Manipulation Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01
Key Finding
RegMix significantly improves adversarial robustness over existing regularization-based adversarial training methods including MSE and FGSM-PGK baselines.
RegMix
Novel technique introduced
Adversarial training is the most effective defense against adversarial attacks. The effectiveness of the adversarial attacks has been on the design of its loss function and regularization term. The most widely used loss function in adversarial training is cross-entropy and mean squared error (MSE) as its regularization objective. However, MSE enforces overly uniform optimization between two output distributions during training, which limits its robustness in adversarial training scenarios. To address this issue, we revisit the idea of mutual learning (originally designed for knowledge distillation) and propose two novel regularization strategies tailored for adversarial training: (i) weighted adversarial mutual regularization and (ii) adversarial generalization regularization. In the former, we formulate a decomposed adversarial mutual Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence) loss, which allows flexible control over the optimization process by assigning unequal weights to the main and auxiliary objectives. In the latter, we introduce an additional clean target distribution into the adversarial training objective, improving generalization and enhancing model robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly improve adversarial robustness compared to existing regularization-based approaches.
Key Contributions
- Weighted adversarial mutual regularization using decomposed asymmetric KL-divergence loss that replaces MSE for flexible control over adversarial training objectives
- Adversarial generalization regularization that incorporates clean target distributions into the adversarial training objective to improve generalization
- RegMix framework combining both strategies, demonstrating improved adversarial robustness over existing regularization-based adversarial training approaches
🛡️ Threat Analysis
Paper's primary contribution is a defense against adversarial examples via improved adversarial training regularization (RegMix), directly targeting the inference-time input manipulation threat.