Enhancing Robustness in Incremental Learning with Adversarial Training

Adversarial training is one of the most effective approaches against adversarial attacks. However, adversarial training has primarily been studied in scenarios where data for all classes is provided, with limited research conducted in the context of incremental learning where knowledge is introduced sequentially. In this study, we investigate Adversarially Robust Class Incremental Learning (ARCIL), which deals with adversarial robustness in incremental learning. We first explore a series of baselines that integrate incremental learning with existing adversarial training methods, finding that they lead to conflicts between acquiring new knowledge and retaining past knowledge. Furthermore, we discover that training new knowledge causes the disappearance of a key characteristic in robust models: a flat loss landscape in input space. To address such issues, we propose a novel and robust baseline for ARCIL, named FLatness preserving Adversarial Incremental learning for Robustness (FLAIR). Experimental results demonstrate that FLAIR significantly outperforms other baselines. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to comprehensively investigate the baselines, challenges, and solutions for ARCIL, which we believe represents a significant advance toward achieving real-world robustness.