defense 2025

RegMix: Adversarial Mutual and Generalization Regularization for Enhancing DNN Robustness

Zhenyu Liu , Varun Ojha

0 citations · 22 references · TrustCom

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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

Input Manipulation Attack

Paper's primary contribution is a defense against adversarial examples via improved adversarial training regularization (RegMix), directly targeting the inference-time input manipulation threat.


Details

Domains
vision
Model Types
cnntransformer
Threat Tags
white_boxinference_timedigital
Datasets
CIFAR-10CIFAR-100
Applications
image classification