Ignition Phase : Standard Training for Fast Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial Training (AT) is a cornerstone defense, but many variants overlook foundational feature representations by primarily focusing on stronger attack generation. We introduce Adversarial Evolution Training (AET), a simple yet powerful framework that strategically prepends an Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) phase to conventional AT. We hypothesize this initial ERM phase cultivates a favorable feature manifold, enabling more efficient and effective robustness acquisition. Empirically, AET achieves comparable or superior robustness more rapidly, improves clean accuracy, and cuts training costs by 8-25\%. Its effectiveness is shown across multiple datasets, architectures, and when augmenting established AT methods. Our findings underscore the impact of feature pre-conditioning via standard training for developing more efficient, principled robust defenses. Code is available in the supplementary material.

@article{yu-hang2025_2506.15685,
  title={ Ignition Phase : Standard Training for Fast Adversarial Robustness },
  author={ Wang Yu-Hang and Liu ying and Fang liang and Wang Xuelin and Junkang Guo and Shiwei Li and Lei Gao and Jian Liu and Wenfei Yin },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.15685},
  year={ 2025 }
}