On the Relation between Sharpness-Aware Minimization and Adversarial Robustness

We propose a novel understanding of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) in the context of adversarial robustness. In this paper, we point out that both SAM and adversarial training (AT) can be viewed as specific feature perturbations, which improve adversarial robustness. However, we note that SAM and AT are distinct in terms of perturbation strength, leading to different accuracy and robustness trade-offs. We provide theoretical evidence for these claims in a simplified model with rigorous mathematical proofs. Furthermore, we conduct experiment to demonstrate that only utilizing SAM can achieve superior adversarial robustness compared to standard training, which is an unexpected benefit. As adversarial training can suffer from a decrease in clean accuracy, we show that using SAM alone can improve robustness without sacrificing clean accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/weizeming/SAM_AT.