Adversarial training, especially projected gradient descent (PGD), has proven
to be a successful approach for improving robustness against adversarial
attacks. After adversarial training, gradients of models with respect to their
inputs have a preferential direction. However, the direction of alignment is
not mathematically well established, making it difficult to evaluate
quantitatively. We propose a novel definition of this direction as the
direction of the vector pointing toward the closest point of the support of the
closest inaccurate class in decision space. To evaluate the alignment with this
direction after adversarial training, we apply a metric that uses generative
adversarial networks to produce the smallest residual needed to change the
class present in the image. We show that PGD-trained models have a higher
alignment than the baseline according to our definition, that our metric
presents higher alignment values than a competing metric formulation, and that
enforcing this alignment increases the robustness of models.