# Boosting Adversarial Robustness and Generalization with Dictionary Structure

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00834 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00834/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [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)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Practical Black-Box Attacks against Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02697/) (2016)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11569/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07460/) (2022)
- [Unlabeled Data Improves Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13736/) (2019)
- [Adversarially Robust Generalization Requires More Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11285/) (2018)
- [Parseval Networks: Improving Robustness to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08847/) (2017)
- [Detecting Adversarial Samples from Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00410/) (2017)
- [Improving Robustness using Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09468/) (2021)
- [On Detecting Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04267/) (2017)
- [Understanding and Improving Fast Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02617/) (2020)
- [Better Diffusion Models Further Improve Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04638/) (2023)
- [On the (Statistical) Detection of Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06280/) (2017)
- [Improving the Robustness of Deep Neural Networks via Stability Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04326/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Robustness through Local Linearization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02610/) (2019)
- [Adversarial purification with Score-based generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06041/) (2021)
- [Self-Adaptive Training: beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10319/) (2020)
- [Robust Learning Meets Generative Models: Can Proxy Distributions Improve Adversarial Robustness?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09425/) (2021)
- [SparseFool: a few pixels make a big difference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02248/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards One-for-All Robustness Across a Continuum of Threat Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02440/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work investigates a novel approach to boost adversarial robustness and generalization by incorporating structural prior into the design of deep learning models. Specifically, our study surprisingly reveals that existing dictionary learning-inspired convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are robust against random noise but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To address this, we propose Elastic Dictionary Learning Networks (EDLNets), a novel ResNet architecture that significantly enhances adversarial robustness and generalization. Extensive and reliable experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in adversarial robustness across multiple datasets, backbone architectures, and threat models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to discover and validate that dictionary structure can reliably enhance deep learning robustness under strong adaptive attacks, unveiling a promising direction for future research.