From Adversarial Training to Generative Adversarial Networks

Xuanqing Liu, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Published 2018-07-27Version 1

In this paper, we are interested in two seemingly different concepts: \textit{adversarial training} and \textit{generative adversarial networks (GANs)}. Particularly, how these techniques help to improve each other. To this end, we analyze the limitation of adversarial training as the defense method, starting from questioning how well the robustness of a model can generalize. Then, we successfully improve the generalizability via data augmentation by the ``fake'' images sampled from generative adversarial networks. After that, we are surprised to see that the resulting robust classifier leads to a better generator, for free. We intuitively explain this interesting phenomenon and leave the theoretical analysis for future work. Motivated by these observations, we propose a system that combines generator, discriminator, and adversarial attacker in a single network. After end-to-end training and fine tuning, our method can simultaneously improve the robustness of classifiers, measured by accuracy under strong adversarial attacks; and the quality of generators, evaluated both aesthetically and quantitatively. In terms of the classifier, we achieve better robustness than the state-of-the-art adversarial training algorithm proposed in (Madry etla., 2017), while our generator achieves competitive performance compared with SN-GAN (Miyato and Koyama, 2018). Source code is publicly available online at \url{https://github.com/anonymous}.