# Detecting Adversarial Data via Provable Adversarial Noise Amplification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02109/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Feature Squeezing: Detecting Adversarial Examples in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01155/) (2017)
- [Parseval Networks: Improving Robustness to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08847/) (2017)
- [Uncovering the Limits of Adversarial Training against Norm-Bounded Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03593/) (2020)
- [Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks through Variance Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15571/) (2021)
- [Better Diffusion Models Further Improve Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04638/) (2023)
- [Deep k-Nearest Neighbors: Towards Confident, Interpretable and Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04765/) (2018)
- [Lipschitz-Margin Training: Scalable Certification of Perturbation Invariance for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04034/) (2018)
- [Dynamical Isometry and a Mean Field Theory of CNNs: How to Train 10,000-Layer Vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05393/) (2018)
- [Detecting Adversarial Samples Using Influence Functions and Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06872/) (2019)
- [Opportunities and Challenges in Deep Learning Adversarial Robustness: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00753/) (2020)
- [Deflecting Adversarial Attacks with Pixel Deflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08926/) (2018)
- [Generalizable Adversarial Training via Spectral Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07457/) (2018)
- [Diffusion-Based Adversarial Sample Generation for Improved Stealthiness and Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16494/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Robustness of Deep Neural Networks: A Survey from a Formal Verification Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12227/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Robustness Limits via Scaling-Law and Human-Alignment Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09349/) (2024)
- [Improving training of deep neural networks via Singular Value Bounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06013/) (2016)
- [Detecting Adversarial Data by Probing Multiple Perturbations Using Expected Perturbation Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16035/) (2023)
- [Norm-Preservation: Why Residual Networks Can Become Extremely Deep?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07477/) (2018)
- [What You See is Not What the Network Infers: Detecting Adversarial Examples Based on Semantic Contradiction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09650/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The nonuniform and growing impact of adversarial noise across the layers of deep neural networks has been used in the literature, without a formal mathematical justification, to detect adversarial inputs and improve robustness. In this work, we study this phenomenon in detail and present a formal adversarial noise amplification theorem. We specify a set of sufficient conditions under which the adversarial noise amplification is mathematically guaranteed. Based on theoretical observations, we propose a novel training methodology with a custom spectral loss function and a specific architectural design to enhance the amplification signal for detecting adversarial data. Finally, we introduce a new, lightweight detection mechanism that leverages the enhanced amplification signal and operates entirely at inference time. To validate our approach, we demonstrate the detector's efficacy against both state-of-the-art attacks and a purpose-built adaptive attack, confirming that enhanced amplification can serve as a robust and reliable signal for adversarial defense.
