Recent work has put forth the hypothesis that adversarial vulnerabilities in neural networks are due to them overusing "non-robust features" inherent in the training data. We show empirically that for PGD-attacks, there is a training stage where neural networks start heavily relying on non-robust features to boost natural accuracy. We also propose a mechanism reducing vulnerability to PGD-style attacks consisting of mixing in a certain amount of images contain-ing mostly "robust features" into each training batch, and then show that robust accuracy is improved, while natural accuracy is not substantially hurt. We show that training on "robust features" provides boosts in robust accuracy across various architectures and for different attacks. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that these "robust features" do not induce spatial invariance.
Deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples and make incomprehensible mistakes, which puts a threat on their real-world deployment. Combined with the idea of adversarial training, preprocessing-based defenses are popular and convenient to use because of their task independence and good generalizability. Current defense methods, especially purification, tend to remove ``noise" by learning and recovering the natural images. However, different from random noise, the adversarial patterns are much easier to be overfitted during model training due to their strong correlation to the i…
Reliable Disentanglement Multi-view Learning Against View Adversarial Attacks
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University(四川大学计算机学院);Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学智能协同计算实验室);National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, Sichuan University(四川省工程数值模拟基础算法与模型重点实验室);Tianfu Jincheng Laboratory(天府锦城实验室);Sichuan National Innovation New Vision UHD Video Technology Co., Ltd.(四川省创新新视野UHD视频技术有限公司)
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recently, 3D adversarial attacks, especially adversarial attacks on point clouds, have elicited mounting interest. However, adversarial point clouds obtained by previous methods show weak transferability and are easy to defend. To address these problems, in this paper we propose a novel point cloud attack (dubbed AOF) that pays more attention on the low-frequency component of point clouds. We combine the losses from point cloud and its low-frequency component to craft adversarial samples. Extensive experiments…
University of Southern California(南加州大学);Information Sciences Institution(信息科学研究所)
The growing number of adversarial attacks in recent years gives attackers an advantage over defenders, as defenders must train detectors after knowing the types of attacks, and many models need to be maintained to ensure good performance in detecting any upcoming attacks. We propose a way to end the tug-of-war between attackers and defenders by treating adversarial attack detection as an anomaly detection problem so that the detector is agnostic to the attack. We quantify the statistical deviation caused by adversarial perturbations in two aspects. The Least Significant Component Feature (LSCF…
Xidian University(西安电子科技大学);The University of Sydney(悉尼大学);Hong Kong Baptist University(香港浸会大学);Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications(重庆邮电大学)
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial noise. Their adversarial robustness can be improved by exploiting adversarial examples. However, given the continuously evolving attacks, models trained on seen types of adversarial examples generally cannot generalize well to unseen types of adversarial examples. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose to remove adversarial noise by learning generalizable invariant features across attacks which maintain semantic classification information. Specifically, we introduce an adversarial feature learning mechanism to disentangle inva…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学);Tencent AI Lab(腾讯人工智能实验室)
While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, considerably few efforts have been paid to construct robust deep tracking algorithms against adversarial attacks. Current studies on adversarial attack and defense mainly reside in a single image. In this work, we first attempt to generate adversarial examples on top of video sequences to improve the tracking robustness against adversarial attacks. To this end, we take temporal motion into consideration when generating lightweight perturbations over the estimated tracking results frame-by-frame. On one hand,…
National Technical University Dnipro Polytechnic(第聂伯彼得罗夫斯克国立技术大学)
Neural networks are now actively being used for computer vision tasks in security critical areas such as robotics, face recognition, autonomous vehicles yet their safety is under question after the discovery of adversarial attacks. In this paper we develop simplified adversarial attack algorithms based on a scoping idea, which enables execution of fast adversarial attacks that minimize structural image quality (SSIM) loss, allows performing efficient transfer attacks with low target inference network call count and opens a possibility of an attack using pen-only drawings on a paper for the MNI…
Adversarial attacks have been shown to be highly effective at degrading the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs). The most prominent defense is adversarial training, a method for learning a robust model. Nevertheless, adversarial training does not make DNNs immune to adversarial perturbations. We propose a novel solution by adopting the recently suggested Predictive Normalized Maximum Likelihood. Specifically, our defense performs adversarial targeted attacks according to different hypotheses, where each hypothesis assumes a specific label for the test sample. Then, by comparing the hypo…
Adversarial patch attack is a family of attack algorithms that perturb a part of image to fool a deep neural network model. Existing patch attacks mostly consider injecting adversarial patches at input-agnostic locations: either a predefined location or a random location. This attack setup may be sufficient for attack but has considerable limitations when using it for adversarial training. Thus, robust models trained with existing patch attacks cannot effectively defend other adversarial attacks. In this paper, we first propose an end-to-end patch attack algorithm, Generative Dynamic Patch Att…
National Digital Switching System Engineering and Technological Research Center(国家数字交换系统工程技术研究中心)
In image classification of deep learning, adversarial examples where inputs intended to add small magnitude perturbations may mislead deep neural networks (DNNs) to incorrect results, which means DNNs are vulnerable to them. Different attack and defense strategies have been proposed to better research the mechanism of deep learning. However, those research in these networks are only for one aspect, either an attack or a defense, not considering that attacks and defenses should be interdependent and mutually reinforcing, just like the relationship between spears and shields. In this paper, we p…
This study provides a new understanding of the adversarial attack problem by examining the correlation between adversarial attack and visual attention change. In particular, we observed that: (1) images with incomplete attention regions are more vulnerable to adversarial attacks; and (2) successful adversarial attacks lead to deviated and scattered attention map. Accordingly, an attention-based adversarial defense framework is designed to simultaneously rectify the attention map for prediction and preserve the attention area between adversarial and original images. The problem of adding iterat…
College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics(南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院)
Efficient and effective attacks are crucial for reliable evaluation of defenses, and also for developing robust models. Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attack has been demonstrated to be one of the most successful adversarial attacks. However, the effect of the standard PGD attack can be easily weakened by rescaling the logits, while the original decision of every input will not be changed. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we propose Scale-Invariant Adversarial Attack (SI-PGD), which utilizes the angle between the features in the penultimate layer and the weights in the softmax layer to…
Adversarial attacks pose safety and security concerns to deep learning applications, but their characteristics are under-explored. Yet largely imperceptible, a strong trace could have been left by PGD-like attacks in an adversarial example. Recall that PGD-like attacks trigger the ``local linearity'' of a network, which implies different extents of linearity for benign or adversarial examples. Inspired by this, we construct an Adversarial Response Characteristics (ARC) feature to reflect the model's gradient consistency around the input to indicate the extent of linearity. Under certain condit…
Advances in the development of adversarial attacks have been fundamental to the progress of adversarial defense research. Efficient and effective attacks are crucial for reliable evaluation of defenses, and also for developing robust models. Adversarial attacks are often generated by maximizing standard losses such as the cross-entropy loss or maximum-margin loss within a constraint set using Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). In this work, we introduce a relaxation term to the standard loss, that finds more suitable gradient-directions, increases attack efficacy and leads to more efficient adv…
Duke University(杜克大学);Hewlett Packard Labs(惠普实验室);Air Force Research Lab(美国空军研究实验室)
Some recent works revealed that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to so-called adversarial attacks where input examples are intentionally perturbed to fool DNNs. In this work, we revisit the DNN training process that includes adversarial examples into the training dataset so as to improve DNN's resilience to adversarial attacks, namely, adversarial training. Our experiments show that different adversarial strengths, i.e., perturbation levels of adversarial examples, have different working zones to resist the attack. Based on the observation, we propose a multi-strength adversarial tra…
Despite extensive research into adversarial attacks, we do not know how adversarial attacks affect image pixels. Knowing how image pixels are affected by adversarial attacks has the potential to lead us to better adversarial defenses. Motivated by instances that we find where strong attacks do not transfer, we delve into adversarial examples at pixel level to scrutinize how adversarial attacks affect image pixel values. We consider several ImageNet architectures, InceptionV3, VGG19 and ResNet50, as well as several strong attacks. We find that attacks can have different effects at pixel level d…
University of California, Santa Barbara(加州大学圣巴巴拉分校);Mayachitra Inc(玛雅奇特拉公司)
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are susceptible to adversarial attacks and deception both during training and deployment. Automatic reverse engineering of the toolchains behind these adversarial machine learning attacks will aid in recovering the tools and processes used in these attacks. In this paper, we present two techniques that support automated identification and attribution of adversarial ML attack toolchains using Co-occurrence Pixel statistics and Laplacian Residuals. Our experiments show that the proposed techniques can identify parameters used to generate adversarial samples. To t…
This work conducts the first analysis on the robustness against adversarial attacks on self-supervised Vision Transformers trained using DINO. First, we evaluate whether features learned through self-supervision are more robust to adversarial attacks than those emerging from supervised learning. Then, we present properties arising for attacks in the latent space. Finally, we evaluate whether three well-known defense strategies can increase adversarial robustness in downstream tasks by only fine-tuning the classification head to provide robustness even in view of limited compute resources. Thes…
Adding perturbations via utilizing auxiliary gradient information or discarding existing details of the benign images are two common approaches for generating adversarial examples. Though visual imperceptibility is the desired property of adversarial examples, conventional adversarial attacks still generate traceable adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Adversarial Attack via Invertible Neural Networks (AdvINN) method to produce robust and imperceptible adversarial examples. Specifically, AdvINN fully takes advantage of the information preservation property of Inverti…
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We…
Machine Learning (ML) models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial inputs and researchers have demonstrated that even production systems, such as self-driving cars and ML-as-a-service offerings, are susceptible. These systems represent a target for bad actors. Their disruption can cause real physical and economic harm. When attacks on production ML systems occur, the ability to attribute the attack to the responsible threat group is a critical step in formulating a response and holding the attackers accountable. We pose the following question: can adversarially perturbed inputs be attribut…
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学)
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently led to significant improvements in many fields. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples which are samples with imperceptible perturbations while dramatically misleading the DNNs. Adversarial attacks can be used to evaluate the robustness of deep learning models before they are deployed. Unfortunately, most of existing adversarial attacks can only fool a black-box model with a low success rate. To improve the success rates for black-box adversarial attacks, we proposed an iterated adversarial attack against an ensemble of image classifiers.…
With the excellent accuracy and feasibility, the Neural Networks have been widely applied into the novel intelligent applications and systems. However, with the appearance of the Adversarial Attack, the NN based system performance becomes extremely vulnerable:the image classification results can be arbitrarily misled by the adversarial examples, which are crafted images with human unperceivable pixel-level perturbation. As this raised a significant system security issue, we implemented a series of investigations on the adversarial attack in this work: We first identify an image's pixel vulnera…
Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. White-box adversarial attacks can fool neural networks with small adversarial perturbations, especially for large size images. However, keeping successful adversarial perturbations imperceptible is especially challenging for transfer-based black-box adversarial attacks. Often such adversarial examples can be easily spotted due to their unpleasantly poor visual qualities, which compromises the threat of adversarial attacks in practice. In this study, to improve the image quality of black-box adversarial examples perceptually, we propos…
This paper aims to explain adversarial attacks in terms of how adversarial perturbations contribute to the attacking task. We estimate attributions of different image regions to the decrease of the attacking cost based on the Shapley value. We define and quantify interactions among adversarial perturbation pixels, and decompose the entire perturbation map into relatively independent perturbation components. The decomposition of the perturbation map shows that adversarially-trained DNNs have more perturbation components in the foreground than normally-trained DNNs. Moreover, compared to the nor…
University of California, San Diego(加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校);Google Brain(谷歌大脑)
There has been an ongoing cycle where stronger defenses against adversarial attacks are subsequently broken by a more advanced defense-aware attack. We present a new approach towards ending this cycle where we "deflect'' adversarial attacks by causing the attacker to produce an input that semantically resembles the attack's target class. To this end, we first propose a stronger defense based on Capsule Networks that combines three detection mechanisms to achieve state-of-the-art detection performance on both standard and defense-aware attacks. We then show that undetected attacks against our d…
Adversarial attacks have been extensively investigated for machine learning systems including deep learning in the digital domain. However, the adversarial attacks on optical neural networks (ONN) have been seldom considered previously. In this work, we first construct an accurate image classifier with an ONN using a mesh of interconnected Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZI). Then a corresponding adversarial attack scheme is proposed for the first time. The attacked images are visually very similar to the original ones but the ONN system becomes malfunctioned and generates wrong classification …
We propose a new adversarial attack to Deep Neural Networks for image classification. Different from most existing attacks that directly perturb input pixels, our attack focuses on perturbing abstract features, more specifically, features that denote styles, including interpretable styles such as vivid colors and sharp outlines, and uninterpretable ones. It induces model misclassfication by injecting imperceptible style changes through an optimization procedure. We show that our attack can generate adversarial samples that are more natural-looking than the state-of-the-art unbounded attacks. T…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学);Cornell University(康奈尔大学)
The black-box adversarial attack has attracted impressive attention for its practical use in the field of deep learning security. Meanwhile, it is very challenging as there is no access to the network architecture or internal weights of the target model. Based on the hypothesis that if an example remains adversarial for multiple models, then it is more likely to transfer the attack capability to other models, the ensemble-based adversarial attack methods are efficient and widely used for black-box attacks. However, ways of ensemble attack are rather less investigated, and existing ensemble att…
Adversarial attacks pose a threat to deep learning models. However, research on adversarial detection methods, especially in the multi-modal domain, is very limited. In this work, we propose an efficient and straightforward detection method based on the temporal correlation between audio and video streams. The main idea is that the correlation between audio and video in adversarial examples will be lower than benign examples due to added adversarial noise. We use the synchronisation confidence score as a proxy for audiovisual correlation and based on it we can detect adversarial attacks. To th…
Monash University(莫纳什大学);Defence Science and Technology Group, Department of Defence(国防部国防科学技术集团)
Deep neural network image classifiers are reported to be susceptible to adversarial evasion attacks, which use carefully crafted images created to mislead a classifier. Many adversarial attacks belong to the category of dense attacks, which generate adversarial examples by perturbing all the pixels of a natural image. To generate sparse perturbations, sparse attacks have been recently developed, which are usually independent attacks derived by modifying a dense attack's algorithm with sparsity regularisations, resulting in reduced attack efficiency. In this paper, we aim to tackle this task fr…
Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples hand-crafted on one white-box model can be used to attack other black-box models. Such cross-model transferability makes it feasible to perform black-box attacks, which has raised security concerns for real-world DNNs applications. Nevertheless, existing works mostly focus on investigating the adversarial transferability across different deep models that share the same modality of input data. The cross-modal transferability of adversarial perturbation has never been explored. This paper investigates the transferability of adversarial perturba…
State-of-the-art deep neural networks are sensitive to small input perturbations. Since the discovery of this intriguing vulnerability, many defence methods have been proposed that attempt to improve robustness to adversarial noise. Fast and accurate attacks are required to compare various defence methods. However, evaluating adversarial robustness has proven to be extremely challenging. Existing norm minimisation adversarial attacks require thousands of iterations (e.g. Carlini & Wagner attack), are limited to the specific norms (e.g. Fast Adaptive Boundary), or produce sub-optimal results (e…
Adversarial attacks are malicious inputs that derail machine-learning models. We propose a scheme to attack autoencoders, as well as a quantitative evaluation framework that correlates well with the qualitative assessment of the attacks. We assess --- with statistically validated experiments --- the resistance to attacks of three variational autoencoders (simple, convolutional, and DRAW) in three datasets (MNIST, SVHN, CelebA), showing that both DRAW's recurrence and attention mechanism lead to better resistance. As autoencoders are proposed for compressing data --- a scenario in which their s…
Despite the great success of deep neural networks, the adversarial attack can cheat some well-trained classifiers by small permutations. In this paper, we propose another type of adversarial attack that can cheat classifiers by significant changes. For example, we can significantly change a face but well-trained neural networks still recognize the adversarial and the original example as the same person. Statistically, the existing adversarial attack increases Type II error and the proposed one aims at Type I error, which are hence named as Type II and Type I adversarial attack, respectively. T…
While vision-language pre-training model (VLP) has shown revolutionary improvements on various vision-language (V+L) tasks, the studies regarding its adversarial robustness remain largely unexplored. This paper studied the adversarial attack on popular VLP models and V+L tasks. First, we analyzed the performance of adversarial attacks under different settings. By examining the influence of different perturbed objects and attack targets, we concluded some key observations as guidance on both designing strong multimodal adversarial attack and constructing robust VLP models. Second, we proposed a…
University of Kentucky(肯塔基大学);Miami University(迈阿密大学)
Despite remarkable performance across a broad range of tasks, neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Many works focus on adversarial attacks and defenses on 2D images, but few focus on 3D point clouds. In this paper, our goal is to enhance the adversarial robustness of PointNet, which is one of the most widely used models for 3D point clouds. We apply the fast gradient sign attack method (FGSM) on 3D point clouds and find that FGSM can be used to generate not only adversarial images but also adversarial point clouds. To minimize the vulnerability of PointNet t…
Deep learning technologies have become the backbone for the development of computer vision. With further explorations, deep neural networks have been found vulnerable to well-designed adversarial attacks. Most of the vision devices are equipped with image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to implement RAW-to-RGB transformations and embedded into data preprocessing module for efficient image processing. Actually, ISP pipeline can introduce adversarial behaviors to post-capture images while data preprocessing may destroy attack patterns. However, none of the existing adversarial attacks takes int…
Neural networks have been proven to be vulnerable to a variety of adversarial attacks. From a safety perspective, highly sparse adversarial attacks are particularly dangerous. On the other hand the pixelwise perturbations of sparse attacks are typically large and thus can be potentially detected. We propose a new black-box technique to craft adversarial examples aiming at minimizing $l_0$-distance to the original image. Extensive experiments show that our attack is better or competitive to the state of the art. Moreover, we can integrate additional bounds on the componentwise perturbation. All…
Enormous hand images with reliable annotations are collected through marker-based MoCap. Unfortunately, degradations caused by markers limit their application in hand appearance reconstruction. A clear appearance recovery insight is an image-to-image translation trained with unpaired data. However, most frameworks fail because there exists structure inconsistency from a degraded hand to a bare one. The core of our approach is to first disentangle the bare hand structure from those degraded images and then wrap the appearance to this structure with a dual adversarial discrimination (DAD) scheme…
INESC TEC(葡萄牙工程与计算机系统研究所);Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto(波尔图大学工程学院);Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (IGD)(弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所);Technische Universität Darmstadt(达姆施塔特工业大学)
Morphing attacks are one of the many threats that are constantly affecting deep face recognition systems. It consists of selecting two faces from different individuals and fusing them into a final image that contains the identity information of both. In this work, we propose a novel regularisation term that takes into account the existent identity information in both and promotes the creation of two orthogonal latent vectors. We evaluate our proposed method (OrthoMAD) in five different types of morphing in the FRLL dataset and evaluate the performance of our model when trained on five distinct…
Disentangling factors of variation within data has become a very challenging problem for image generation tasks. Current frameworks for training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), learn to disentangle the representations of the data in an unsupervised fashion and capture the most significant factors of the data variations. However, these approaches ignore the principle of content and style disentanglement in image generation, which means their learned latent code may alter the content and style of the generated images at the same time. This paper describes the Style and Content Disentangl…
Beihang University(北京航空航天大学);Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University(北京航空航天大学人工智能研究院);Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University(北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院)
Along with the widespread use of face recognition systems, their vulnerability has become highlighted. While existing face anti-spoofing methods can be generalized between attack types, generic solutions are still challenging due to the diversity of spoof characteristics. Recently, the spoof trace disentanglement framework has shown great potential for coping with both seen and unseen spoof scenarios, but the performance is largely restricted by the single-modal input. This paper focuses on this issue and presents a multi-modal disentanglement model which targetedly learns polysemantic spoof t…
MLSD-GAN -- Generating Strong High Quality Face Morphing Attacks using Latent Semantic Disentanglement
Advanced Technology Development Centre, IIT Kharagpur(印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校先进技术发展中心);Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)(挪威科技大学);Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur(印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校计算机科学与工程系)
Boost UAV-based Ojbect Detection via Scale-Invariant Feature Disentanglement and Adversarial Learning
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai University(河海大学计算机与软件学院);College of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Hohai University(河海大学人工智能与自动化学院);School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology(南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院);School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University(格里菲斯大学信息与通信技术学院)
University of Sydney(悉尼大学);University of New South Wales(新南威尔士大学);University of Pittsburgh(匹兹堡大学);Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney(悉尼大学脑与心智中心)
Recent advances in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) techniques have witnessed great success in cross-domain computer vision tasks, enhancing the generalization ability of data-driven deep learning architectures by bridging the domain distribution gaps. For the UDA-based cross-domain object detection methods, the majority of them alleviate the domain bias by inducing the domain-invariant feature generation via adversarial learning strategy. However, their domain discriminators have limited classification ability due to the unstable adversarial training process. Therefore, the extracted feat…
We present the task of differential face morph attack detection using a conditional generative network (cGAN). To determine whether a face image in an identification document, such as a passport, is morphed or not, we propose an algorithm that learns to implicitly disentangle identities from the morphed image conditioned on the trusted reference image using the cGAN. Furthermore, the proposed method can also recover some underlying information about the second subject used in generating the morph. We performed experiments on AMSL face morph, MorGAN, and EMorGAN datasets to demonstrate the effe…
Adversarial Training (AT) is proposed to alleviate the adversarial vulnerability of machine learning models by extracting only robust features from the input, which, however, inevitably leads to severe accuracy reduction as it discards the non-robust yet useful features. This motivates us to preserve both robust and non-robust features and separate them with disentangled representation learning. Our proposed Adversarial Asymmetric Training (AAT) algorithm can reliably disentangle robust and non-robust representations without additional supervision on robustness. Empirical results show our meth…
Duke University(杜克大学);Oak Ridge National Laboratory(橡树岭国家实验室)
We present a self-supervised method to disentangle factors of variation in high-dimensional data that does not rely on prior knowledge of the underlying variation profile (e.g., no assumptions on the number or distribution of the individual latent variables to be extracted). In this method which we call NashAE, high-dimensional feature disentanglement is accomplished in the low-dimensional latent space of a standard autoencoder (AE) by promoting the discrepancy between each encoding element and information of the element recovered from all other encoding elements. Disentanglement is promoted e…
School of Computer Science and Engineering(计算机科学与工程学院);The Hebrew University of Jerusalem(耶路撒冷希伯来大学)
Learning to disentangle the hidden factors of variations within a set of observations is a key task for artificial intelligence. We present a unified formulation for class and content disentanglement and use it to illustrate the limitations of current methods. We therefore introduce LORD, a novel method based on Latent Optimization for Representation Disentanglement. We find that latent optimization, along with an asymmetric noise regularization, is superior to amortized inference for achieving disentangled representations. In extensive experiments, our method is shown to achieve better disent…