TAET: Two-Stage Adversarial Equalization Training on Long-Tailed Distributions

Adversarial robustness remains a significant challenge in deploying deep neural networks for real-world applications. While adversarial training is widely acknowledged as a promising defense strategy, most existing studies primarily focus on balanced datasets, neglecting the fact that real-world data often exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which introduces substantial challenges to robustness. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of adversarial training in the context of long-tailed distributions and identify the limitations of the current state-of-the-art method, AT-BSL, in achieving robust performance under such conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel training framework, TAET, which incorporates an initial stabilization phase followed by a stratified, equalization adversarial training phase. Furthermore, prior work on long-tailed robustness has largely overlooked a crucial evaluation metric—balanced accuracy. To fill this gap, we introduce the concept of balanced robustness, a comprehensive metric that measures robustness specifically under long-tailed distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing advanced defenses, yielding significant improvements in both memory and computational efficiency. We believe this work represents a substantial step forward in tackling robustness challenges in real-world applications.Supplementary material contains our code.