Collaboratively Guided Adversarial Robust Distillation with Teacher-Favorable Examples

arXiv:2610.11306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adversarial distillation transfers robustness from high-capacity teachers to compact students. Existing adversarial distillation methods mainly use teacher predictions on clean or adversarial examples to supervise student learning. However, teacher-favorable supervision within the perturbation neighborhood remains underexplored in adversarial distillation. We therefore propose Collaboratively Guided Adversarial Robust Distillation (CGARD), which jointly optimizes distinct student-adversarial and teacher-collaborative examples within the same perturbation neighborhood. The teacher-collaborative example is constrained to incur no greater cross-entropy loss under the teacher than the clean input. CGARD combines collaborative teacher guidance with adversarial teacher supervision to improve robust knowledge transfer. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, including white-box evaluation and additional black-box transfer evaluation, demonstrate consistent robustness improvements over strong adversarial distillation baselines.