ATVis: Understanding and diagnosing adversarial training processes through visual analytics

Abstract

Adversarial training has emerged as a major strategy against adversarial perturbations in deep neural networks, which mitigates the issue of exploiting model vulnerabilities to generate incorrect predictions. Despite enhancing robustness, adversarial training often results in a trade-off with standard accuracy on normal data, a phenomenon that remains a contentious issue. In addition, the opaque nature of deep neural network models renders it more difficult to inspect and diagnose how adversarial training processes evolve. This paper introduces ATVis, a visual analytics framework for examining and diagnosing adversarial training processes. Through multi-level visualization design, ATVis enables the examination of model robustness from various granularity, facilitating a detailed understanding of the dynamics in the training epochs. The framework reveals the complex relationship between adversarial robustness and standard accuracy, which further offers insights into the mechanisms that drive the trade-offs observed in adversarial training. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated through case studies.