# Alleviating the Effect of Data Imbalance on Adversarial Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11569/) (2020)
- [Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10740/) (2020)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [Disentangling Label Distribution for Long-tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00321/) (2020)
- [Self-Adaptive Training: beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10319/) (2020)
- [The Devil is in Classification: A Simple Framework for Long-tail Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11978/) (2020)
- [Striking the Right Balance with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07590/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Robustness under Long-Tailed Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02703/) (2021)
- [Solving Long-tailed Recognition with Deep Realistic Taxonomic Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09898/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Trustworthy Machine Learning via Memorization and the Granular Long-Tail: A Survey on Interactions, Tradeoffs, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07501/) (2025)
- [Long-tailed Adversarial Training with Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06461/) (2025)
- [Taming the Long Tail: Rebalancing Adversarial Training via Adaptive Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13395/) (2026)
- [Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training for Long-Tailed Robustness via Geometric Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02183/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study adversarial training on datasets that obey the long-tailed distribution, which is practical but rarely explored in previous works. Compared with conventional adversarial training on balanced datasets, this process falls into the dilemma of generating uneven adversarial examples (AEs) and an unbalanced feature embedding space, causing the resulting model to exhibit low robustness and accuracy on tail data. To combat that, we theoretically analyze the lower bound of the robust risk to train a model on a long-tailed dataset to obtain the key challenges in addressing the aforementioned dilemmas. Based on it, we propose a new adversarial training framework -- Re-balancing Adversarial Training (REAT). This framework consists of two components: (1) a new training strategy inspired by the effective number to guide the model to generate more balanced and informative AEs; (2) a carefully constructed penalty function to force a satisfactory feature space. Evaluation results on different datasets and model structures prove that REAT can effectively enhance the model's robustness and preserve the model's clean accuracy. The code can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/REAT.