ADCT: Improving Robustness and Calibration of Pattern Recognition Models Against Visual Illusions

Perception-level interference patterns, such as abutting gratings that induce illusory contours and pseudoisochromatic dot camouflage, can trigger failures that are not well captured by conventional corruption benchmarks. We construct an illusion-driven evaluation suite based on MNIST variants, including AG-MNIST and Ishihara-MNIST, under a unified 224×224×3 pipeline with fixed train/validation/test splits. Building on a multi-domain empirical risk minimization (ERM) baseline, we present AugMix–DeepAugment Consistency Training (ADCT), a training-time recipe that combines mixed augmentations, DeepAugment-style image distortions, and Jensen–Shannon consistency regularization. Across multiple ImageNet-pretrained backbones and multiple random seeds, ADCT improves robustness on the five-set illusion OOD suite (OOD5) on average while simultaneously improving probabilistic calibration, as measured by ECE together with proper scoring rules (NLL and Brier score). For ResNet-50, ADCT yields a substantial gain on OOD5 relative to the Ishihara-only baseline (S0), increasing accuracy from 29.0% to 59.7% and reducing NLL from 7.44 to 1.11. To assess external validity, we additionally report results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-10-C and compare against representative augmentation-based baselines (including PixMix), contextualizing the robustness–calibration trade-off on a widely used natural-image robustness benchmark. These results suggest that consistency-based augmentation recipes can improve both robustness and confidence reliability under structured, illusion-like shifts without changing inference-time architectures.