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Contrastive ECOC: Learning Output Codes for Adversarial Defense

Machine Learning 2025-08-15 v1 Artificial Intelligence Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

Although one-hot encoding is commonly used for multiclass classification, it is not always the most effective encoding mechanism. Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) address multiclass classification by mapping each class to a unique codeword used as a label. Traditional ECOC methods rely on manually designed or randomly generated codebooks, which are labor-intensive and may yield suboptimal, dataset-agnostic results. This paper introduces three models for automated codebook learning based on contrastive learning, allowing codebooks to be learned directly and adaptively from data. Across four datasets, our proposed models demonstrate superior robustness to adversarial attacks compared to two baselines. The source is available at https://github.com/YuChou20/Automated-Codebook-Learning-with-Error-Correcting-Output-Code-Technique.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.10491,
  title  = {Contrastive ECOC: Learning Output Codes for Adversarial Defense},
  author = {Che-Yu Chou and Hung-Hsuan Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.10491},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:49:36.263Z