Papers › Data Augmentation Can Improve Robustness

Data Augmentation Can Improve Robustness

9 Nov 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2111.05328archive 2025-07-28

Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi, Sven Gowal, Dan A. Calian, Florian Stimberg, Olivia Wiles, Timothy Mann

Adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting, a phenomenon where the robust test accuracy starts to decrease during training. In this paper, we focus on reducing robust overfitting by using common data augmentation schemes. We demonstrate that, contrary to previous findings, when combined with model weight averaging, data augmentation can significantly boost robust accuracy. Furthermore, we compare various augmentations techniques and observe that spatial composition techniques work the best for adversarial training. Finally, we evaluate our approach on CIFAR-10 against ℓ_∞ and ℓ₂ norm-bounded perturbations of size ϵ= 8/255 and ϵ= 128/255, respectively. We show large absolute improvements of +2.93% and +2.16% in robust accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. In particular, against ℓ_∞ norm-bounded perturbations of size ϵ= 8/255, our model reaches 60.07% robust accuracy without using any external data. We also achieve a significant performance boost with this approach while using other architectures and datasets such as CIFAR-100, SVHN and TinyImageNet.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

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

Code

deepmind/deepmind-research officialmentioned in papertf 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

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data Augmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

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