Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training for Long-Tailed Robustness via Geometric Alignment
Adversarial training is effective on balanced datasets, but its robustness degrades under longtailed class distributions, where tail classes suffer high robust error and unstable decision boundaries. We propose Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training (MCAT), a unified framework that enforces the semantic validity of adversarial examples by penalizing deviations from class-conditional manifolds in feature space, while promoting balanced geometric separation across classes via an ETF-inspired regularization. We provide theoretical results that link geometric separation to lower bounds on adversarially robust margins, and show that manifold-constrained adversarial risk upperbounds robust r...
| Authors | Guanmeng Xian, Ning Yang, Philip S. Yu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 May 2026 |
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