Transfer learning is a widely-used paradigm in deep learning, where models pre-trained on standard datasets can be efficiently adapted to downstream tasks. Typically, better pre-trained models yield better transfer results, suggesting that initial accuracy is a key aspect of transfer learning performance. In this work, we identify another such aspect: we find that adversarially robust models, while less accurate, often perform better than their standard-trained counterparts when used for transfer learning. Specifically, we focus on adversarially robust ImageNet classifiers, and show that they yield improved accuracy on a standard suite of downstream classification tasks. Further analysis uncovers more differences between robust and standard models in the context of transfer learning. Our results are consistent with (and in fact, add to) recent hypotheses stating that robustness leads to improved feature representations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Microsoft/robust-models-transfer .

本研究证明，相较于标准预训练模型，鲁棒性较强的预训练模型在转移学习中表现更佳。通过研究图像分类任务，发现鲁棒性较强的ImageNet分类器在一系列标准下游任务中得到了更高的准确性。

对抗鲁棒性 ImageNet 模型是否具有更好的迁移能力？