Adversarial attacks and defenses are currently active areas of research for
the deep learning community. A recent review paper divided the defense
approaches into three categories; gradient masking, robust optimization, and
adversarial example detection. We divide gradient masking and robust
optimization differently: (1) increasing intra-class compactness and
inter-class separation of the feature vectors improves adversarial robustness,
and (2) marginalization or removal of non-robust image features also improves
adversarial robustness. By reframing these topics differently, we provide a
fresh perspective that provides insight into the underlying factors that enable
training more robust networks and can help inspire novel solutions. In
addition, there are several papers in the literature of adversarial defenses
that claim there is a cost for adversarial robustness, or a trade-off between
robustness and accuracy but, under this proposed taxonomy, we hypothesis that
this is not universal. We follow up on our taxonomy with several challenges to
the deep learning research community that builds on the connections and
insights in this paper.