English

Adversarial Examples Improve Image Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2020-04-15 v2

Abstract

Adversarial examples are commonly viewed as a threat to ConvNets. Here we present an opposite perspective: adversarial examples can be used to improve image recognition models if harnessed in the right manner. We propose AdvProp, an enhanced adversarial training scheme which treats adversarial examples as additional examples, to prevent overfitting. Key to our method is the usage of a separate auxiliary batch norm for adversarial examples, as they have different underlying distributions to normal examples. We show that AdvProp improves a wide range of models on various image recognition tasks and performs better when the models are bigger. For instance, by applying AdvProp to the latest EfficientNet-B7 [28] on ImageNet, we achieve significant improvements on ImageNet (+0.7%), ImageNet-C (+6.5%), ImageNet-A (+7.0%), Stylized-ImageNet (+4.8%). With an enhanced EfficientNet-B8, our method achieves the state-of-the-art 85.5% ImageNet top-1 accuracy without extra data. This result even surpasses the best model in [20] which is trained with 3.5B Instagram images (~3000X more than ImageNet) and ~9.4X more parameters. Models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.09665,
  title  = {Adversarial Examples Improve Image Recognition},
  author = {Cihang Xie and Mingxing Tan and Boqing Gong and Jiang Wang and Alan Yuille and Quoc V. Le},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09665},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

CVPR 2020, models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:23:45.078Z