mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards One-for-All Robustness Across a Continuum of Threat Levels

arXiv 2609.02440 ↗First posted 2 Sep 2026cs.LG cs.AIcited by 0

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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.

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References · 21

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9 more
  1. 2018Curriculum Adversarial Trainingcited by 89
  2. 2019Adversarial Robustness Against the Union of Multiple Perturbation Modelscited by 88
  3. 2017Ensemble Methods as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations Against Deep Neural Networkscited by 31
  4. 2023Robust Graph Neural Networks via Unbiased Aggregationcited by 8
  5. 2021Mixture of Robust Experts (MoRE):A Robust Denoising Method towards multiple perturbationscited by 6
  6. 2024ProTransformer: Robustify Transformers via Plug-and-Play Paradigmcited by 5
  7. 2023OODRobustBench: a Benchmark and Large-Scale Analysis of Adversarial Robustness under Distribution Shiftcited by 4
  8. 2024Robustness Reprogramming for Representation Learningcited by 4
  9. 2025Boosting Adversarial Robustness and Generalization with Dictionary Structurecited by 1

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