  While adversarial training is generally used as a defense mechanism, recent
works show that it can also act as a regularizer. By co-training a neural
network on clean and adversarial inputs, it is possible to improve
classification accuracy on the clean, non-adversarial inputs. We demonstrate
that, contrary to previous findings, it is not necessary to separate batch
statistics when co-training on clean and adversarial inputs, and that it is
sufficient to use adapters with few domain-specific parameters for each type of
input. We establish that using the classification token of a Vision Transformer
(ViT) as an adapter is enough to match the classification performance of dual
normalization layers, while using significantly less additional parameters.
First, we improve upon the top-1 accuracy of a non-adversarially trained
ViT-B16 model by +1.12% on ImageNet (reaching 83.76% top-1 accuracy). Second,
and more importantly, we show that training with adapters enables model soups
through linear combinations of the clean and adversarial tokens. These model
soups, which we call adversarial model soups, allow us to trade-off between
clean and robust accuracy without sacrificing efficiency. Finally, we show that
we can easily adapt the resulting models in the face of distribution shifts.
Our ViT-B16 obtains top-1 accuracies on ImageNet variants that are on average
+4.00% better than those obtained with Masked Autoencoders.
