In safety-critical applications such as medical imaging and autonomous
driving, where decisions have profound implications for patient health and road
safety, it is imperative to maintain both high adversarial robustness to
protect against potential adversarial attacks and reliable uncertainty
quantification in decision-making. With extensive research focused on enhancing
adversarial robustness through various forms of adversarial training (AT), a
notable knowledge gap remains concerning the uncertainty inherent in
adversarially trained models. To address this gap, this study investigates the
uncertainty of deep learning models by examining the performance of conformal
prediction (CP) in the context of standard adversarial attacks within the
adversarial defense community. It is first unveiled that existing CP methods do
not produce informative prediction sets under the commonly used
$l_{\infty}$-norm bounded attack if the model is not adversarially trained,
which underpins the importance of adversarial training for CP. Our paper next
demonstrates that the prediction set size (PSS) of CP using adversarially
trained models with AT variants is often worse than using standard AT,
inspiring us to research into CP-efficient AT for improved PSS. We propose to
optimize a Beta-weighting loss with an entropy minimization regularizer during
AT to improve CP-efficiency, where the Beta-weighting loss is shown to be an
upper bound of PSS at the population level by our theoretical analysis.
Moreover, our empirical study on four image classification datasets across
three popular AT baselines validates the effectiveness of the proposed
Uncertainty-Reducing AT (AT-UR).