# A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Deep Model Robustness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04508/) (2015)
- [ZOO: Zeroth Order Optimization based Black-box Attacks to Deep Neural Networks without Training Substitute Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03999/) (2017)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks: Reliable Attacks Against Black-Box Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04248/) (2017)
- [On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06705/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Adversarial Effects Through Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01991/) (2017)
- [Defense against Adversarial Attacks Using High-Level Representation Guided Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02976/) (2017)
- [DeepXplore: Automated Whitebox Testing of Deep Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06640/) (2017)
- [Certified Defenses against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09344/) (2018)
- [Parseval Networks: Improving Robustness to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08847/) (2017)
- [DeepTest: Automated Testing of Deep-Neural-Network-driven Autonomous Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08559/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Risk and the Dangers of Evaluating Against Weak Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05666/) (2018)
- [A study of the effect of JPG compression on adversarial images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00853/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Training and Robustness for Multiple Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13000/) (2019)
- [Semidefinite relaxations for certifying robustness to adversarial examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01057/) (2018)
- [Efficient Decision-based Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04433/) (2019)
- [DeepGauge: Multi-Granularity Testing Criteria for Deep Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07519/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [A Comprehensive Study on Robustness of Image Classification Models: Benchmarking and Rethinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14301/) (2023)
- [SafeBench: A Safety Evaluation Framework for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18927/) (2024)
- [Visual Adversarial Attack on Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18275/) (2024)
- [GenderBias-VL: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Vision Language Models via Counterfactual Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00600/) (2024)
- [Compromising Embodied Agents with Contextual Backdoor Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02882/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding the Safety Boundaries of DeepSeek Models: Evaluation and Findings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15092/) (2025)
- [Latent Imitator: Generating Natural Individual Discriminatory Instances for Black-Box Fairness Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11602/) (2023)
- [BiBench: Benchmarking and Analyzing Network Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11233/) (2023)
- [Towards Comprehensive Testing on the Robustness of Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07932/) (2022)
- [Exploring Inconsistent Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection with Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09841/) (2022)
- [RobustMQ: Benchmarking Robustness of Quantized Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02350/) (2023)
- [Towards Benchmarking and Assessing Visual Naturalness of Physical World Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12863/) (2023)
- [LanEvil: Benchmarking the Robustness of Lane Detection to Environmental Illusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00934/) (2024)
- [AttackBench: Evaluating Gradient-based Attacks for Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19460/) (2024)
- [FAIRER: Fairness as Decision Rationale Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15299/) (2023)
- [Visual Robustness Benchmark for Visual Question Answering (VQA)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03386/) (2024)
- [Isolation and Induction: Training Robust Deep Neural Networks against Model Stealing Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00958/) (2023)
- [Efficient Backdoor Defense in Multimodal Contrastive Learning: A Token-Level Unlearning Method for Mitigating Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19526/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of Image Classification and Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Surveying and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12111/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Physical World Adversarial Robustness of Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03476/) (2023)
- [Do ImageNet-trained models learn shortcuts? The impact of frequency shortcuts on generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03519/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Generation and Collaborative Evolution of Safety-Critical Scenarios for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14527/) (2025)
- [T2VAttack: Adversarial Attack on Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23953/) (2025)
- [Module-wise Adaptive Adversarial Training for End-to-end Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07321/) (2024)
- [MetAdv: A Unified and Interactive Adversarial Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06534/) (2025)
- [PRJ: Perception-Retrieval-Judgement for Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03683/) (2025)
- [Investigating the Potential of Large Language Model-Based Router Multi-Agent Architectures for Foundation Design Automation: A Task Classification and Expert Selection Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13811/) (2025)
- [PromptSafe: Gated Prompt Tuning for Safe Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01272/) (2025)
- [An Investigation of Visual Foundation Models Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16225/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Assessment Benchmark for Rigorously Evaluating Deep Learning Image Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04137/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of applications, while they are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which motivates the evaluation and benchmark of model robustness. However, current evaluations usually use simple metrics to study the performance of defenses, which are far from understanding the limitation and weaknesses of these defense methods. Thus, most proposed defenses are quickly shown to be attacked successfully, which results in the ``arm race'' phenomenon between attack and defense. To mitigate this problem, we establish a model robustness evaluation framework containing 23 comprehensive and rigorous metrics, which consider two key perspectives of adversarial learning (i.e., data and model). Through neuron coverage and data imperceptibility, we use data-oriented metrics to measure the integrity of test examples; by delving into model structure and behavior, we exploit model-oriented metrics to further evaluate robustness in the adversarial setting. To fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we conduct large-scale experiments on multiple datasets including CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet using different models and defenses with our open-source platform. Overall, our paper provides a comprehensive evaluation framework, where researchers could conduct comprehensive and fast evaluations using the open-source toolkit, and the analytical results could inspire deeper understanding and further improvement to the model robustness.