  It is well known that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to
adversarial attacks, which are implemented by adding crafted perturbations onto
benign examples. Min-max robust optimization based adversarial training can
provide a notion of security against adversarial attacks. However, adversarial
robustness requires a significantly larger capacity of the network than that
for the natural training with only benign examples. This paper proposes a
framework of concurrent adversarial training and weight pruning that enables
model compression while still preserving the adversarial robustness and
essentially tackles the dilemma of adversarial training. Furthermore, this work
studies two hypotheses about weight pruning in the conventional setting and
finds that weight pruning is essential for reducing the network model size in
the adversarial setting, training a small model from scratch even with
inherited initialization from the large model cannot achieve both adversarial
robustness and high standard accuracy. Code is available at
https://github.com/yeshaokai/Robustness-Aware-Pruning-ADMM.
