Boosting Adversarial Robustness and Generalization with Dictionary Structure

This work investigates a novel approach to boost adversarial robustness and generalization by incorporating structural prior into the design of deep learning models. Specifically, our study surprisingly reveals that existing dictionary learning-inspired convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide a false sense of security against adversarial attacks. To address this, we propose Elastic Dictionary Learning Networks (EDLNets), a novel ResNet architecture that significantly enhances adversarial robustness and generalization. Extensive and reliable experiments demonstrate consistent and significant performance improvement on open robustness leaderboards such as RobustBench, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to discover and validate that dictionary structure can reliably enhance deep learning robustness under strong adaptive attacks, unveiling a promising direction for future research. Our implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ElasticDL-6343.