TIMA: Text-Image Mutual Awareness for Balancing Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness and Generalization Ability

Abstract:Achieving zero-shot adversarial robustness without sacrificing generalization remains challenging for foundation models such as CLIP, especially under large adversarial perturbations. Through empirical analyses, we identify three critical yet overlooked issues: (1) Logit margins exhibit a stable offset between small and large adversarial perturbations, suggesting that explicitly adjusting margins could improve robustness against unseen large perturbations. (2) A significant negative correlation exists between logit margin and inter-class semantic similarity, indicating that semantic structures are insufficiently leveraged by existing methods. (3) Existing methods for adjusting text embeddings disrupt the intrinsic semantic consistency established by pre-trained models, undermining generalization capability. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel Text-Image Mutual Awareness (TIMA) framework, including a Text-Aware Image (TAI) tuning module with an Adaptive Semantic-Aware Margin (ASAM) to explicitly calibrate logit margins, and an Image-Aware Text (IAT) tuning module with Semantic Consistent Minimum Hyperspherical Energy (SC-MHE) to preserve semantic consistency. Comprehensive experiments validate that TIMA significantly outperforms existing approaches by effectively addressing the identified limitations.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2405.17678 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2405.17678v2 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.17678 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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