Pre-trained Model Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks and exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization capability while they are also vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial examples. Existing works typically employ adversarial training (fine-tuning) as a defense method against adversarial examples. However direct application to the CLIP model may result in overfitting compromising the model's capacity for generalization. In this paper we propose Pre-trained Model Guided Adversarial Fine-Tuning (PMG-AFT) method which leverages supervision from the original pre-trained model by carefully designing an auxiliary branch to enhance the model's zero-shot adversarial robustness. Specifically PMG-AFT minimizes the distance between the features of adversarial examples in the target model and those in the pre-trained model aiming to preserve the generalization features already captured by the pre-trained model. Extensive Experiments on 15 zero-shot datasets demonstrate that PMG-AFT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method improving the top-1 robust accuracy by an average of 4.99%. Furthermore our approach consistently improves clean accuracy by an average of 8.72%.