defense 2025

C-LEAD: Contrastive Learning for Enhanced Adversarial Defense

Suklav Ghosh , Sonal Kumar , Arijit Sur

1 citations · 51 references · arXiv

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Published on arXiv

2510.27249

Input Manipulation Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01

Key Finding

Contrastive loss-augmented adversarial training yields significant robustness gains against various adversarial perturbation types compared to standard baselines.

C-LEAD

Novel technique introduced


Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks such as image classification, segmentation, and object detection. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can cause incorrect predictions with small perturbations in input images. Addressing this issue is crucial for deploying robust deep-learning systems. This paper presents a novel approach that utilizes contrastive learning for adversarial defense, a previously unexplored area. Our method leverages the contrastive loss function to enhance the robustness of classification models by training them with both clean and adversarially perturbed images. By optimizing the model's parameters alongside the perturbations, our approach enables the network to learn robust representations that are less susceptible to adversarial attacks. Experimental results show significant improvements in the model's robustness against various types of adversarial perturbations. This suggests that contrastive loss helps extract more informative and resilient features, contributing to the field of adversarial robustness in deep learning.


Key Contributions

  • First application of contrastive learning as an adversarial defense mechanism for image classification models
  • Joint optimization of model parameters and adversarial perturbations using contrastive loss to learn robust, discriminative representations
  • Demonstrated significant robustness improvements against multiple types of adversarial perturbations

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Input Manipulation Attack

Directly defends against adversarial input perturbations that cause misclassification at inference time; uses contrastive loss jointly with adversarial training to improve robustness — a core ML01 defense contribution.


Details

Domains
vision
Model Types
cnntransformer
Threat Tags
white_boxinference_timedigital
Applications
image classificationobject detectionimage segmentation