Mitigating Low-Frequency Bias: Feature Recalibration and Frequency Attention Regularization for Adversarial Robustness

Ensuring the robustness of computer vision models against adversarial attacks is a significant and long-lasting objective. Motivated by adversarial attacks, researchers have devoted considerable efforts to enhancing model robustness by adversarial training. However, we observe that while AT improves the models’ robustness against adversarial perturbations, it fails to improve their ability to effectively extract features across all frequency components. Each frequency component contains distinct types of crucial information- low-frequency features provide fundamental structural insights, while high-frequency features capture intricate details and textures. In particular, AT tends to neglect the reliance on susceptible high-frequency features. This low-frequency bias impedes the model’s ability to effectively leverage the potentially meaningful semantic information present in high-frequency features. This paper proposes a novel module called High-Frequency Feature Disentanglement and Recalibration (HFDR), which separates features into high-frequency and low-frequency components and recalibrates the high-frequency feature to capture latent useful semantics. Additionally, we introduce frequency attention regularization to magnitude the model’s extraction of different frequency features and mitigate low-frequency bias during AT. Extensive experiments showcase the immense potential and superiority of our approach in resisting various white-box attacks, transfer attacks, and showcasing strong generalization capabilities.

arxiv