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PAD: A Robustness Enhancement Ensemble Method via Promoting Attention Diversity

Deep neural networks can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, even for the mainstream Transformer-based models. Although several robustness enhancement approaches have been proposed, they usually focus on some certain type of perturbation. As the types of attack can be various and unpredictable in practical scenarios, a general and strong defense method is urgently in require. We notice that most well-trained models can be weakly robust in the perturbation space, i.e., only a small ratio of adversarial examples exist. Inspired by the weak robust property, this paper presents a novel ensemble method for enhancing robustness. We propose a lightweight framework PAD to save computational resources in realizing an ensemble. Instead of training multiple models, a plugin module is designed to perturb the parameters of a base model which can achieve the effect of multiple models. Then, to diversify adversarial example distributions among different models, we promote each model to have different attention patterns via optimizing a diversity measure we defined. Experiments on various widely-used datasets and target models show that PAD can consistently improve the defense ability against many types of adversarial attacks while maintaining accuracy on clean data. Besides, PAD also presents good interpretability via visualizing diverse attention patterns.