Adversarial attack has recently become a tremendous threat to deep learning
models. To improve the robustness of machine learning models, adversarial
training, formulated as a minimax optimization problem, has been recognized as
one of the most effective defense mechanisms. However, the non-convex and
non-concave property poses a great challenge to the minimax training. In this
paper, we empirically demonstrate that the commonly used PGD attack may not be
optimal for inner maximization, and improved inner optimizer can lead to a more
robust model. Then we leverage a learning-to-learn (L2L) framework to train an
optimizer with recurrent neural networks, providing update directions and steps
adaptively for the inner problem. By co-training optimizer's parameters and
model's weights, the proposed framework consistently improves the model
robustness over PGD-based adversarial training and TRADES.