With the growth of interest in the attack and defense of deep neural
networks, researchers are focusing more on the robustness of applying them to
devices with limited memory. Thus, unlike adversarial training, which only
considers the balance between accuracy and robustness, we come to a more
meaningful and critical issue, i.e., the balance among accuracy, efficiency and
robustness (AER). Recently, some related works focused on this issue, but with
different observations, and the relations among AER remain unclear. This paper
first investigates the robustness of pruned models with different compression
ratios under the gradual pruning process and concludes that the robustness of
the pruned model drastically varies with different pruning processes,
especially in response to attacks with large strength. Second, we test the
performance of mixing the clean data and adversarial examples (generated with a
prescribed uniform budget) into the gradual pruning process, called adversarial
pruning, and find the following: the pruned model's robustness exhibits high
sensitivity to the budget. Furthermore, to better balance the AER, we propose
an approach called blind adversarial pruning (BAP), which introduces the idea
of blind adversarial training into the gradual pruning process. The main idea
is to use a cutoff-scale strategy to adaptively estimate a nonuniform budget to
modify the AEs used during pruning, thus ensuring that the strengths of AEs are
dynamically located within a reasonable range at each pruning step and
ultimately improving the overall AER of the pruned model. The experimental
results obtained using BAP for pruning classification models based on several
benchmarks demonstrate the competitive performance of this method: the
robustness of the model pruned by BAP is more stable among varying pruning
processes, and BAP exhibits better overall AER than adversarial pruning.