# Mitigating Low-Frequency Bias: Feature Recalibration and Frequency Attention Regularization for Adversarial Robustness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04016 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04016/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (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)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (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)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11569/) (2020)
- [Minimally distorted Adversarial Examples with a Fast Adaptive Boundary Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02044/) (2019)
- [Feature Denoising for Improving Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03411/) (2018)
- [High Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13545/) (2019)
- [A Fourier Perspective on Model Robustness in Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08988/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Examples Improve Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09665/) (2019)
- [Generalizing Face Forgery Detection with High-frequency Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12376/) (2021)
- [Attacks Which Do Not Kill Training Make Adversarial Learning Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11242/) (2020)
- [Understanding and Improving Fast Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02617/) (2020)
- [Texture Fields: Learning Texture Representations in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07259/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Adversarial Example: Towards Good Generalizations for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12208/) (2022)
- [Frequency Domain Model Augmentation for Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05382/) (2022)
- [Feature Distillation: DNN-Oriented JPEG Compression Against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05787/) (2018)
- [LAS-AT: Adversarial Training with Learnable Attack Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06616/) (2022)
- [Learnable Boundary Guided Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11164/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Sticker: A Stealthy Attack Method in the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06728/) (2021)
- [Universal Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11304/) (2018)
- [When NAS Meets Robustness: In Search of Robust Architectures against Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10695/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [FastDINOv2: Frequency Based Curriculum Learning Improves Robustness and Training Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03779/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Causal Alignment for High-Confidence Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03925/) (2026)
- [FU-Mamba: A Frequency-Enhanced Dynamic Scanning Framework for Oralscan Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ensuring the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. While adversarial training (AT) has emerged as a promising defense strategy, our analysis reveals a critical limitation: AT-trained models exhibit a bias toward low-frequency features while neglecting high-frequency components. This bias is particularly concerning as each frequency component carries distinct and crucial information: low-frequency features encode fundamental structural patterns, while high-frequency features capture intricate details and textures. To address this limitation, we propose High-Frequency Feature Disentanglement and Recalibration (HFDR), a novel module that strategically separates and recalibrates frequency-specific features to capture latent semantic cues. We further introduce frequency attention regularization to harmonize feature extraction across the frequency spectrum and mitigate the inherent low-frequency bias of AT. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superior performance against white-box attacks and transfer attacks, while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios.