Alignment and Adversarial Robustness: Are More Human-Like Models More Secure?

Abstract: Representational alignment refers to the extent to which a model's internal representations mirror biological vision, offering insights into both neural similarity and functional correspondence. Recently, some more aligned models have demonstrated higher resiliency to adversarial examples, raising the question of whether more human-aligned models are inherently more secure. In this work, we conduct a large-scale empirical analysis to systematically investigate the relationship between representational alignment and adversarial robustness. We evaluate 118 models spanning diverse architectures and training paradigms, measuring their neural and behavioral alignment and engineering task performance across 106 benchmarks as well as their adversarial robustness via AutoAttack. Our findings reveal that while average alignment and robustness exhibit a weak overall correlation, specific alignment benchmarks serve as strong predictors of adversarial robustness, particularly those that measure selectivity towards texture or shape. These results suggest that different forms of alignment play distinct roles in model robustness, motivating further investigation into how alignment-driven approaches can be leveraged to build more secure and perceptually-grounded vision models.