Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel on clean images but struggle with corrupted ones. Incorporating specific corruptions into the data augmentation pipeline can improve robustness to those corruptions but may harm performance on clean images and other types of distortion. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach that improves the robustness of DNNs to a wide range of corruptions without compromising accuracy on clean images. We first demonstrate that input perturbations can be mimicked by multiplicative perturbations in the weight space. Leveraging this, we propose Data Augmentation via Multiplicative Perturbation (DAMP), a training method that optimizes DNNs under random multiplicative weight perturbations. We also examine the recently proposed Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (ASAM) and show that it optimizes DNNs under adversarial multiplicative weight perturbations. Experiments on image classification datasets (CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet and ImageNet) and neural network architectures (ResNet50, ViT-S/16, ViT-B/16) show that DAMP enhances model generalization performance in the presence of corruptions across different settings. Notably, DAMP is able to train a ViT-S/16 on ImageNet from scratch, reaching the top-1 error of 23.7% which is comparable to ResNet50 without extensive data augmentations.

To enhance robustness against a specific corruption, one could simply include it in the data augmentation pipeline during training. However, this approach can diminish performance on clean images and reduce robustness to other types of corruptions (Geirhos et al., 2018).

This appendix is structured as follows: In Section A, we provide an overview of the notation we use throughout the paper. In Section C, we provide experimental details. In Section D, we provide additional experiment results. In Section E, we present the numerical results shown in Figure 4. In Section G, we provide an overview of CG and LiSSA algorithms.

We investigate the impact of channel-wise mixing via multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on the generalization capabilities of recurrent convolutional networks. Specifically, we compare two architectures: DARC (Depth Aware Recurrent Convolution), which employs a simple recurrent convolutional structure, and DAMP (Depth Aware Multi-layer Perceptron), which extends DARC with a gated MLP for channel mixing. Using the Re-ARC benchmark, we find that DAMP significantly outperforms DARC in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization under exact-match grading criteria. These results suggest that explicit channel mixing through MLPs enables recurrent convolutional networks to learn more robust and generalizable computational patterns. Our findings have implications for neural program synthesis and highlight the potential of DAMP as a target architecture for hypernetwork approaches.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel on clean images but struggle with corrupted ones. Incorporating specific corruptions into the data augmentation pipeline can improve robustness to those corruptions but may harm performance on clean images and other types of distortion. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach that improves the robustness of DNNs to a wide range of corruptions without compromising accuracy on clean images. We first demonstrate that input perturbations can be mimicked by multiplicative perturbations in the weight space. Leveraging this, we propose Data Augmentation via Multiplicative Perturbation (DAMP), a training method that optimizes DNNs under random multiplicative weight perturbations.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel on clean images but struggle with corrupted ones. Incorporating specific corruptions into the data augmentation pipeline can improve robustness to those corruptions but may harm performance on clean images and other types of distortion. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach that improves the robustness of DNNs to a wide range of corruptions without compromising accuracy on clean images. We first demonstrate that input perturbations can be mimicked by multiplicative perturbations in the weight space. Leveraging this, we propose Data Augmentation via Multiplicative Perturbation (DAMP), a training method that optimizes DNNs under random multiplicative weight perturbations. We also examine the recently proposed Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (ASAM) and show that it optimizes DNNs under adversarial multiplicative weight perturbations. Experiments on image classification datasets (CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet and ImageNet) and neural network architectures (ResNet50, ViT-S/16) show that DAMP enhances model generalization performance in the presence of corruptions across different settings. Notably, DAMP is able to train a ViT-S/16 on ImageNet from scratch, reaching the top-1 error of 23.7% which is comparable to ResNet50 without extensive data augmentations.

Conventional Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) strives to minimize distribution discrepancy between domains, which neglects to harness rich semantics from data and struggles to handle complex domain shifts. A promising technique is to leverage the knowledge of large-scale pre-trained vision-language models for more guided adaptation. Despite some endeavors, current methods often learn textual prompts to embed domain semantics for source and target domains separately and perform classification within each domain, limiting cross-domain knowledge transfer. Moreover, prompting only the language branch lacks flexibility to adapt both modalities dynamically. To bridge this gap, we propose Domain-Agnostic Mutual Prompting (DAMP) to exploit domain-invariant semantics by mutually aligning visual and textual embeddings. Specifically, the image contextual information is utilized to prompt the language branch in a domain-agnostic and instance-conditioned way. Meanwhile, visual prompts are imposed based on the domain-agnostic textual prompt to elicit domain-invariant visual embeddings. These two branches of prompts are learned mutually with a cross-attention module and regularized with a semantic-consistency loss and an instance-discrimination contrastive loss. Experiments on three UDA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DAMP over state-of-the-art approaches.