  Neural network pruning has shown to be an effective technique for reducing
the network size, trading desirable properties like generalization and
robustness to adversarial attacks for higher sparsity. Recent work has claimed
that adversarial pruning methods can produce sparse networks while also
preserving robustness to adversarial examples. In this work, we first
re-evaluate three state-of-the-art adversarial pruning methods, showing that
their robustness was indeed overestimated. We then compare pruned and dense
versions of the same models, discovering that samples on thin ice, i.e., closer
to the unpruned model's decision boundary, are typically misclassified after
pruning. We conclude by discussing how this intuition may lead to designing
more effective adversarial pruning methods in future work.

Machine Learning;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition