Papers › Bag of Tricks for Adversarial Training

Bag of Tricks for Adversarial Training

1 Oct 2020ICLR 2021 1arXiv:2010.00467archive 2025-07-28

Tianyu Pang, Xiao Yang, Yinpeng Dong, Hang Su, Jun Zhu

Adversarial training (AT) is one of the most effective strategies for promoting model robustness. However, recent benchmarks show that most of the proposed improvements on AT are less effective than simply early stopping the training procedure. This counter-intuitive fact motivates us to investigate the implementation details of tens of AT methods. Surprisingly, we find that the basic settings (e.g., weight decay, training schedule, etc.) used in these methods are highly inconsistent. In this work, we provide comprehensive evaluations on CIFAR-10, focusing on the effects of mostly overlooked training tricks and hyperparameters for adversarially trained models. Our empirical observations suggest that adversarial robustness is much more sensitive to some basic training settings than we thought. For example, a slightly different value of weight decay can reduce the model robust accuracy by more than 7%, which is probable to override the potential promotion induced by the proposed methods. We conclude a baseline training setting and re-implement previous defenses to achieve new state-of-the-art results. These facts also appeal to more concerns on the overlooked confounders when benchmarking defenses.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2010.00467")

Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 3 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 1 has no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it.

By repository: official repository: 1 sample from 1 repository, 1 ran; 2 identical to code first harvested elsewhere. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

P2333/Bag-of-Tricks-for-AT officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
fra31/auto-attack officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

3 samples harvested; 2 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 1 has no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
1ran · fixture could not drive it
1unverified

Licence: 2 of the 3 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from P2333/Bag-of-Tricks-for-AT. Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

normalize_TRADES P2333/Bag-of-Tricks-for-AT/eval_cifar.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bc1f1db61881cb0b · report
mixup_data identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · fixture could not drive it licence of this copy not recorded · b20f1357b1d8dbf8 · report
clamp identical code first harvested elsewhere unverified licence of this copy not recorded · 8a93e041134b597a · report

Tasks

Adversarial RobustnessBenchmarking

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Early StoppingWeight Decay

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections