# Adversarial LassoNet: Robust Feature Selection via Stability-Driven Sparse Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03839/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07572/) (2018)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [Benign Overfitting in Linear Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11300/) (2019)
- [Improving the Adversarial Robustness and Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks by Regularizing their Input Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09404/) (2017)
- [LassoNet: A Neural Network with Feature Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12207/) (2019)
- [FISTA-Net: Learning A Fast Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Network for Inverse Problems in Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02683/) (2020)
- [Detecting Shortcut Learning for Fair Medical AI using Shortcut Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10384/) (2022)
- [A Performance-Driven Benchmark for Feature Selection in Tabular Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05877/) (2023)
- [Advancing diagnostic performance and clinical usability of neural networks via adversarial training and dual batch normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13011/) (2020)
- [On the Adversarial Robustness of LASSO Based Feature Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10045/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sparse feature selection is critical for high-dimensional machine learning, yet traditional ℓ1-regularized methods are often brittle under observational noise and spurious correlations, leading to unstable feature supports and degraded generalization. Although adversarial training has been widely used to improve model robustness, its interaction with hierarchical sparse feature selection remains underexplored. In this work, we propose Adversarial LassoNet (AdLNet), a stability-driven sparse feature selection framework that integrates input-space adversarial perturbations with the hierarchical sparsity mechanism of LassoNet. We derive a tractable first-order adversarial approximation under local smoothness assumptions and provide an NTK-inspired spectral analysis to characterize how perturbation-driven training can reduce gradient concentration. Experiments on high-dimensional SERS data, six public benchmark datasets, and ColoredMNIST show that AdLNet maintains competitive sparse-selection performance while improving out-of-distribution robustness by 4.4% and feature support reproducibility by 6.3% under nearly matched support sparsity on ColoredMNIST. On the high-dimensional lung cancer screening dataset, AdLNet achieves a 5.3% test accuracy gain and a 6.0% AUC improvement over vanilla LassoNet. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/719573/Adversarial-LassoNet.
