In response to the rapidly evolving nature of adversarial attacks on a monthly basis, numerous defenses have been proposed to generalize against as many known attacks as possible. However, designing a defense method that can generalize to all types of attacks, including unseen ones, is not realistic because the environment in which defense systems operate is dynamic and comprises various unique attacks used by many attackers. The defense system needs to upgrade itself by utilizing few-shot defense feedback and efficient memory. Therefore, we propose the first continual adversarial defense (CAD) framework that adapts to any attacks in a dynamic scenario, where various attacks emerge stage by stage. In practice, CAD is modeled under four principles: (1) continual adaptation to new attacks without catastrophic forgetting, (2) few-shot adaptation, (3) memory-efficient adaptation, and (4) high accuracy on both clean and adversarial images. We leverage cutting-edge continual learning, few-shot learning, and ensemble learning techniques to qualify the principles. Experiments conducted on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 validate the effectiveness of our approach against multiple stages of 10 modern adversarial attacks and significant improvements over 10 baseline methods. In particular, CAD is capable of quickly adapting with minimal feedback and a low cost of defense failure, while maintaining good performance against old attacks. Our research sheds light on a brand-new paradigm for continual defense adaptation against dynamic and evolving attacks.

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