  The study of adversarial examples and their activation has attracted
significant attention for secure and robust learning with deep neural networks
(DNNs). Different from existing works, in this paper, we highlight two new
characteristics of adversarial examples from the channel-wise activation
perspective: 1) the activation magnitudes of adversarial examples are higher
than that of natural examples; and 2) the channels are activated more uniformly
by adversarial examples than natural examples. We find that the
state-of-the-art defense adversarial training has addressed the first issue of
high activation magnitudes via training on adversarial examples, while the
second issue of uniform activation remains. This motivates us to suppress
redundant activation from being activated by adversarial perturbations via a
Channel-wise Activation Suppressing (CAS) strategy. We show that CAS can train
a model that inherently suppresses adversarial activation, and can be easily
applied to existing defense methods to further improve their robustness. Our
work provides a simple but generic training strategy for robustifying the
intermediate layer activation of DNNs.
