Decoupled Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Adversarial Robustness

Chaoning Zhang, Kang Zhang, Chenshuang Zhang, Axi Niu, Jiu Feng, Chang D. Yoo, In So Kweon ;

"\textit{Adversarial training} (AT) for robust representation learning and \textit{self-supervised learning} (SSL) for unsupervised representation learning are two active research fields. Integrating AT into SSL, multiple prior works have accomplished a highly significant yet challenging task: learning robust representation without labels. A widely used framework is adversarial contrastive learning which couples AT and SSL, and thus constitutes a very complex optimization problem. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer philosophy, we conjecture that it might be simplified as well as improved by solving two sub-problems: non-robust SSL and pseudo-supervised AT. This motivation shifts the focus of the task from seeking an optimal integrating strategy for a coupled problem to finding sub-solutions for sub-problems. With this said, this work discards prior practices of directly introducing AT to SSL frameworks and proposed a two-stage framework termed \underline{De}coupled \underline{A}dversarial \underline{C}ontrastive \underline{L}earning (DeACL). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our DeACL achieves SOTA self-supervised adversarial robustness while significantly reducing the training time, which validates its effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, our DeACL constitutes a more explainable solution, and its success also bridges the gap with semi-supervised AT for exploiting unlabeled samples for robust representation learning."