# DropAttack: A Masked Weight Adversarial Training Method to Improve Generalization of Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12805 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12805/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Visualizing the Loss Landscape of Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09913/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Training Methods for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07725/) (2016)
- [FreeLB: Enhanced Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11764/) (2019)
- [Generating Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11342/) (2017)
- [You Only Propagate Once: Accelerating Adversarial Training via Maximal Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00877/) (2019)
- [Robust Neural Machine Translation with Doubly Adversarial Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02443/) (2019)
- [Do We Need Zero Training Loss After Achieving Zero Training Error?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08709/) (2020)
- [Learning Reporting Dynamics during Breaking News for Rumour Detection in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07363/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Adversarial Self-Attention for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12608/) (2022)
- [Layer-wise Regularized Dropout for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16361/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adversarial training has been proven to be a powerful regularization method to improve the generalization of models. However, current adversarial training methods only attack the original input sample or the embedding vectors, and their attacks lack coverage and diversity. To further enhance the breadth and depth of attack, we propose a novel masked weight adversarial training method called DropAttack, which enhances generalization of model by adding intentionally worst-case adversarial perturbations to both the input and hidden layers in different dimensions and minimize the adversarial risks generated by each layer. DropAttack is a general technique and can be adopt to a wide variety of neural networks with different architectures. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we used five public datasets in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) for experimental evaluating. We compare the proposed method with other adversarial training methods and regularization methods, and our method achieves state-of-the-art on all datasets. In addition, Dropattack can achieve the same performance when it use only a half training data compared to other standard training method. Theoretical analysis reveals that DropAttack can perform gradient regularization at random on some of the input and wight parameters of the model. Further visualization experiments show that DropAttack can push the minimum risk of the model to a lower and flatter loss landscapes. Our source code is publicly available on https://github.com/nishiwen1214/DropAttack.