Explaining the Saliency Map Sparsity of Adversarially-Trained Neural Networks

arXiv:2610.10666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding why deep neural networks make a given prediction is of great importance for their safe deployment. In computer vision, saliency maps, which highlight the image region most influential for a prediction, remain a widely-used form of explanation. An empirical observation is the apparent sparsity of gradient saliency maps of adversarially-trained neural networks. In this paper, we propose a theoretical explanation of this phenomenon for two-layer ReLU networks. We build on the established equivalence of adversarial training to the minimization of the empirical risk with weight-decay penalization and an added adversarial total variation term -- valid for certain loss functions. As the number of data points and neurons grows and the regularization parameters are sent to zero at appropriate rates, we prove that minimizers converge to a Bayes classifier with minimal gradient and Barron norm. Sparsity appears since for adversarial training with $\ell_\infty$-attacks the gradient norm is anisotropic and favors axis-aligned / sparse gradients. We illustrate our theoretical findings experimentally by evaluating the gradient $\ell_1$-norm and thresholded sparsity of naturally versus adversarially trained models.