Towards One-for-All Robustness Across a Continuum of Threat Levels
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Adversarially robust models often overfit to a specific attack budget, necessitating multiple specialized models for diverse and dynamic adversarial environments, a strategy that becomes fundamentally intractable as the threat space grows. This raises an open challenge: can we achieve strong robustness across a continuum of threat levels within a single model? We propose the Threat Conditional Network (TCN), grounded in a representation factorization framework that decomposes representation learning into a threat-invariant shared backbone and a lightweight threat-conditional adaptor. TCN conditions a single model on the perturbation level via Fourier-based embeddings and channel-wise affine modulation, and is trained against a distribution over perturbation budgets, enabling flexible and seamless adaptation across an infinite continuum of threat levels during inference. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet show that TCN matches or surpasses a full ensemble of budget-specialized models with a single set of parameters, generalizes to unseen perturbation budgets, and transfers robustly under mismatched threat conditions, with only 4.6% parameter overhead. These contributions chart a promising path toward adaptive and generalizable robustness in dynamic and diverse threat environments.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 21 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.
Builds on
21 of 27 references.
References · 21
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
- 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
- 2017Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attackscited by 6,326
- 2017FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layercited by 2,286
- 2019Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracycited by 1,510
- 2020Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attackscited by 1,442
- 2020WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shiftscited by 1,366
- 2020Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learningcited by 504
- 2020Uncovering the Limits of Adversarial Training against Norm-Bounded Adversarial Examplescited by 275
- 2019Improving Adversarial Robustness via Promoting Ensemble Diversitycited by 213
- 2019Adversarial Training and Robustness for Multiple Perturbationscited by 182
- 2020Perceptual Adversarial Robustness: Defense Against Unseen Threat Modelscited by 137
9 more
- 2018Curriculum Adversarial Trainingcited by 89
- 2019Adversarial Robustness Against the Union of Multiple Perturbation Modelscited by 88
- 2017Ensemble Methods as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations Against Deep Neural Networkscited by 31
- 2023Robust Graph Neural Networks via Unbiased Aggregationcited by 8
- 2021Mixture of Robust Experts (MoRE):A Robust Denoising Method towards multiple perturbationscited by 6
- 2024ProTransformer: Robustify Transformers via Plug-and-Play Paradigmcited by 5
- 2023OODRobustBench: a Benchmark and Large-Scale Analysis of Adversarial Robustness under Distribution Shiftcited by 4
- 2024Robustness Reprogramming for Representation Learningcited by 4
- 2025Boosting Adversarial Robustness and Generalization with Dictionary Structurecited by 1
Built on by
Not cited yet.