Machine learning technologies using deep neural networks (DNNs), especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have made automated, accurate, and fast medical image analysis a reality for many applications, and some DNN-based medical image analysis systems have even been FDA-cleared. Despite the progress, challenges remain to build DNNs as reliable as human expert doctors. It is known that DNN classifiers may not be robust to noises: by adding a small amount of noise to an input image, a DNN classifier may make a wrong classification of the noisy image (i.e., in-distribution adversarial sample), whereas it makes the right classification of the clean image. Another issue is caused by out-of-distribution samples that are not similar to any sample in the training set. Given such a sample as input, the output of a DNN will become meaningless. In this study, we investigated the in-distribution (IND) and out-of-distribution (OOD) adversarial robustness of a representative CNN for lumbar disk shape reconstruction from spine MR images. To study the relationship between dataset size and robustness to IND adversarial attacks, we used a data augmentation method to create training sets with different levels of shape variations. We utilized the PGD-based algorithm for IND adversarial attacks and extended it for OOD adversarial attacks to generate OOD adversarial samples for model testing. The results show that IND adversarial training can improve the CNN robustness to IND adversarial attacks, and larger training datasets may lead to higher IND robustness. However, it is still a challenge to defend against OOD adversarial attacks.
The aim of this study is to investigate the segmentation accuracies of different segmentation networks trained on 730 manually annotated lateral lumbar spine X-rays. Instance segmentation networks were compared to semantic segmentation networks. The study cohort comprised diseased spines and postoperative images with metallic implants. The average mean accuracy and mean intersection over union (IoU) was up to 3 percent better for the best performing instance segmentation model, the average pixel accuracy and weighted IoU were slightly better for the best performing semantic segmentation model.…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Plexalis Ltd（Plexalis有限公司）
We propose a novel convolutional method for the detection and identification of vertebrae in whole spine MRIs. This involves using a learnt vector field to group detected vertebrae corners together into individual vertebral bodies and convolutional image-to-image translation followed by beam search to label vertebral levels in a self-consistent manner. The method can be applied without modification to lumbar, cervical and thoracic-only scans across a range of different MR sequences. The resulting system achieves 98.1% detection rate and 96.5% identification rate on a challenging clinical datas…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）
In this paper, we design and evaluate a convolutional autoencoder that perturbs an input face image to impart privacy to a subject. Specifically, the proposed autoencoder transforms an input face image such that the transformed image can be successfully used for face recognition but not for gender classification. In order to train this autoencoder, we propose a novel training scheme, referred to as semi-adversarial training in this work. The training is facilitated by attaching a semi-adversarial module consisting of a pseudo gender classifier and a pseudo face matcher to the autoencoder. The …
New York University（纽约大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究）；CIFAR（加拿大高级研究所（CIFAR））
We propose a retrieval-augmented convolutional network and propose to train it with local mixup, a novel variant of the recently proposed mixup algorithm. The proposed hybrid architecture combining a convolutional network and an off-the-shelf retrieval engine was designed to mitigate the adverse effect of off-manifold adversarial examples, while the proposed local mixup addresses on-manifold ones by explicitly encouraging the classifier to locally behave linearly on the data manifold. Our evaluation of the proposed approach against five readily-available adversarial attacks on three datasets--…
Fundaciò per al Foment de la Investigaciò Sanitària i Biomèdica (FISABIO)（瓦伦西亚卫生与生物医学研究促进基金会（FISABIO））；Hospital Arnau de Vilanova（阿尔瑙·德·比拉诺瓦医院）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Regional ministry of Universal Health and Public Health in Valencia（瓦伦西亚全民健康与公共卫生部）
One of the major difficulties in medical image segmentation is the high variability of these images, which is caused by their origin (multi-centre), the acquisition protocols (multi-parametric), as well as the variability of human anatomy, the severity of the illness, the effect of age and gender, among others. The problem addressed in this work is the automatic semantic segmentation of lumbar spine Magnetic Resonance images using convolutional neural networks. The purpose is to assign a class label to each pixel of an image. Classes were defined by radiologists and correspond to different str…
Despite substantial advances in network architecture performance, the susceptibility of adversarial attacks makes deep learning challenging to implement in safety-critical applications. This paper proposes a data-centric approach to addressing this problem. A nonlocal denoising method with different luminance values has been used to generate adversarial examples from the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST) and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR-10) data sets. Under perturbation, the method provided absolute accuracy improvements of up to 9.3% i…
Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Institute of Big Data Research（北京大数据研究院）
We attempt to interpret how adversarially trained convolutional neural networks (AT-CNNs) recognize objects. We design systematic approaches to interpret AT-CNNs in both qualitative and quantitative ways and compare them with normally trained models. Surprisingly, we find that adversarial training alleviates the texture bias of standard CNNs when trained on object recognition tasks, and helps CNNs learn a more shape-biased representation. We validate our hypothesis from two aspects. First, we compare the salience maps of AT-CNNs and standard CNNs on clean images and images under different tran…
Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学自然语言处理研究所）
We investigate densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNets) and their extension with domain adversarial training for noise robust speech recognition. DenseNets are very deep, compact convolutional neural networks which have demonstrated incredible improvements over the state-of-the-art results in computer vision. Our experimental results reveal that DenseNets are more robust against noise than other neural network based models such as deep feed forward neural networks and convolutional neural networks. Moreover, domain adversarial learning can further improve the robustness of DenseNet…
Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学）；Conestoga College（康尼斯托加学院）；New York University（纽约大学）
Numerous recent studies have demonstrated how Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers can be fooled by adversarial examples, in which an attacker adds perturbations to an original sample, causing the classifier to misclassify the sample. Adversarial attacks that render DNNs vulnerable in real life represent a serious threat in autonomous vehicles, malware filters, or biometric authentication systems. In this paper, we apply Fast Gradient Sign Method to introduce perturbations to a facial image dataset and then test the output on a different classifier that we trained ourselves, to analyze transf…
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Mass segmentation is an important task in mammogram analysis, providing effective morphological features and regions of interest (ROI) for mass detection and classification. Inspired by the success of using deep convolutional features for natural image analysis and conditional random fields (CRF) for structural learning, we propose an end-to-end network for mammographic mass segmentation. The network employs a fully convolutional network (FCN) to model potential function, followed by a CRF to perform structural learning. Because the mass distribution varies greatly with pixel position, the FCN…
University of Ostrava（俄斯特拉发大学）；Institute for Research and Applications of Fuzzy Modeling（模糊建模研究与应用研究所）
We propose a new, simple framework for crafting adversarial examples for black box attacks. The idea is to simulate the substitution model with a non-trainable model compounded of just one layer of handcrafted convolutional kernels and then train the generator neural network to maximize the distance of the outputs for the original and generated adversarial image. We show that fooling the prediction of the first layer causes the whole network to be fooled and decreases its accuracy on adversarial inputs. Moreover, we do not train the neural network to obtain the first convolutional layer kernel…
Offenburg University（奥芬堡大学）；Fraunhofer ITWM（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所）；Fraunhofer Research Center ML（弗劳恩霍夫机器学习研究中心）
Deep learning models are intrinsically sensitive to distribution shifts in the input data. In particular, small, barely perceivable perturbations to the input data can force models to make wrong predictions with high confidence. An common defense mechanism is regularization through adversarial training which injects worst-case perturbations back into training to strengthen the decision boundaries, and to reduce overfitting. In this context, we perform an investigation of 3x3 convolution filters that form in adversarially-trained models. Filters are extracted from 71 public models of the linf-R…
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been more and more applied in mobile robotics such as intelligent vehicles. Security of CNNs in robotics applications is an important issue, for which potential adversarial attacks on CNNs are worth research. Pooling is a typical step of dimension reduction and information discarding in CNNs. Such information discarding may result in mis-deletion and mis-preservation of data features which largely influence the output of the network. This may aggravate the vulnerability of CNNs to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we conduct adversarial attacks on CNN…
A counter-intuitive property of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is their inherent susceptibility to adversarial examples, which severely hinders the application of CNNs in security-critical fields. Adversarial examples are similar to original examples but contain malicious perturbations. Adversarial training is a simple and effective defense method to improve the robustness of CNNs to adversarial examples. The mechanisms behind adversarial examples and adversarial training are worth exploring. Therefore, this work investigates similarities and differences between normally trained CNNs (NT…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；SynSense（SynSense（芯仑科技））；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Zürich（苏黎世大学）
Event-based dynamic vision sensors provide very sparse output in the form of spikes, which makes them suitable for low-power applications. Convolutional spiking neural networks model such event-based data and develop their full energy-saving potential when deployed on asynchronous neuromorphic hardware. Event-based vision being a nascent field, the sensitivity of spiking neural networks to potentially malicious adversarial attacks has received little attention so far. We show how white-box adversarial attack algorithms can be adapted to the discrete and sparse nature of event-based visual data…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Tensor network decomposition, originated from quantum physics to model entangled many-particle quantum systems, turns out to be a promising mathematical technique to efficiently represent and process big data in parsimonious manner. In this study, we show that tensor networks can systematically partition structured data, e.g. color images, for distributed storage and communication in privacy-preserving manner. Leveraging the sea of big data and metadata privacy, empirical results show that neighbouring subtensors with implicit information stored in tensor network formats cannot be identified f…
We present batch virtual adversarial training (BVAT), a novel regularization method for graph convolutional networks (GCNs). BVAT addresses the shortcoming of GCNs that do not consider the smoothness of the model's output distribution against local perturbations around the input. We propose two algorithms, sample-based BVAT and optimization-based BVAT, which are suitable to promote the smoothness of the model for graph-structured data by either finding virtual adversarial perturbations for a subset of nodes far from each other or generating virtual adversarial perturbations for all nodes with …
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Robustness of neural networks has recently been highlighted by the adversarial examples, i.e., inputs added with well-designed perturbations which are imperceptible to humans but can cause the network to give incorrect outputs. In this paper, we design a new CNN architecture that by itself has good robustness. We introduce a simple but powerful technique, Random Mask, to modify existing CNN structures. We show that CNN with Random Mask achieves state-of-the-art performance against black-box adversarial attacks without applying any adversarial training. We next investigate the adversarial examp…
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Visa Research（Visa研究院）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
Adversarial attacks on a convolutional neural network (CNN) -- injecting human-imperceptible perturbations into an input image -- could fool a high-performance CNN into making incorrect predictions. The success of adversarial attacks raises serious concerns about the robustness of CNNs, and prevents them from being used in safety-critical applications, such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Our work introduces a visual analytics approach to understanding adversarial attacks by answering two questions: (1) which neurons are more vulnerable to attacks and (2) which image features do t…
Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Institute of Big Data Research (BIBDR)（北京大数据研究院）
The effectiveness of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has been demonstrated in a wide range of graph-based machine learning tasks. However, the update of parameters in GCNs is only from labeled nodes, lacking the utilization of unlabeled data. In this paper, we apply Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT), an adversarial regularization method based on both labeled and unlabeled data, on the supervised loss of GCN to enhance its generalization performance. By imposing virtually adversarial smoothness on the posterior distribution in semi-supervised learning, VAT yields improvement on the Symmetr…
Graph convolutional neural networks, which learn aggregations over neighbor nodes, have achieved great performance in node classification tasks. However, recent studies reported that such graph convolutional node classifier can be deceived by adversarial perturbations on graphs. Abusing graph convolutions, a node's classification result can be influenced by poisoning its neighbors. Given an attributed graph and a node classifier, how can we evaluate robustness against such indirect adversarial attacks? Can we generate strong adversarial perturbations which are effective on not only one-hop nei…
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
In this paper, we study the robustness of graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Despite the good performance of GCNs on graph semi-supervised learning tasks, previous works have shown that the original GCNs are very unstable to adversarial perturbations. In particular, we can observe a severe performance degradation by slightly changing the graph adjacency matrix or the features of a few nodes, making it unsuitable for security-critical applications. Inspired by the previous works on adversarial defense for deep neural networks, and especially adversarial training algorithm, we propose a method…
In general, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are easy to train, but their essential properties, such as generalization error and adversarial robustness, are hard to control. Recent research demonstrated that singular values of convolutional layers significantly affect such elusive properties and offered several methods for controlling them. Nevertheless, these methods present an intractable computational challenge or resort to coarse approximations. In this paper, we offer a principled approach to alleviating constraints of the prior art at the expense of an insignificant reduction in laye…
CYENS Centre of Excellence（CYENS卓越中心）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Deepfakes are synthetically generated images, videos or audios, which fraudsters use to manipulate legitimate information. Current deepfake detection systems struggle against unseen data. To address this, we employ three different deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, (1) VGG16, (2) InceptionV3, and (3) XceptionNet to classify fake and real images extracted from videos. We also constructed a fusion of the deep CNN models to improve the robustness and generalisation capability. The proposed technique outperforms state-of-the-art models with 96.5% accuracy, when tested on publicly avai…
South China Agricultural University（华南农业大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Since the Lipschitz properties of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely considered to be related to adversarial robustness, we theoretically characterize the $\ell_1$ norm and $\ell_\infty$ norm of 2D multi-channel convolutional layers and provide efficient methods to compute the exact $\ell_1$ norm and $\ell_\infty$ norm. Based on our theorem, we propose a novel regularization method termed norm decay, which can effectively reduce the norms of convolutional layers and fully-connected layers. Experiments show that norm-regularization methods, including norm decay, weight decay, and s…
In this paper, we propose Code-Bridged Classifier (CBC), a framework for making a Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) robust against adversarial attacks without increasing or even by decreasing the overall models' computational complexity. More specifically, we propose a stacked encoder-convolutional model, in which the input image is first encoded by the encoder module of a denoising auto-encoder, and then the resulting latent representation (without being decoded) is fed to a reduced complexity CNN for image classification. We illustrate that this network not only is more robust to adversari…
A Convolutional Layer Activation Dimensionality Reduction for Out-of-Distribution and Adversarial Attack Detection Methods
Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Advanced Research Center on Electronic Systems “Ercole De Castro” (ARCES) - Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学“埃尔科莱·德·卡斯特罗”电子系统高级研究中心）
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）；Soochow University（东吴大学）；National Sun Yat-sen University（国立中山大学）
Deep learning (DL) has been applied extensively in a wide range of fields. However, it has been shown that DL models are susceptible to a certain kinds of perturbations called \emph{adversarial attacks}. To fully unlock the power of DL in critical fields such as financial trading, it is necessary to address such issues. In this paper, we present a method of constructing perturbed examples and use these examples to boost the robustness of the model. Our algorithm increases the stability of DL models for candlestick classification with respect to perturbations in the input data.
Increasingly more similarities between human vision and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been revealed in the past few years. Yet, vanilla CNNs often fall short in generalizing to adversarial or out-of-distribution (OOD) examples which humans demonstrate superior performance. Adversarial training is a leading learning algorithm for improving the robustness of CNNs on adversarial and OOD data; however, little is known about the properties, specifically the shape bias and internal features learned inside adversarially-robust CNNs. In this paper, we perform a thorough, systematic study t…
Recent works reveal that re-calibrating the intermediate activation of adversarial examples can improve the adversarial robustness of a CNN model. The state of the arts [Baiet al., 2021] and [Yanet al., 2021] explores this feature at the channel level, i.e. the activation of a channel is uniformly scaled by a factor. In this paper, we investigate the intermediate activation manipulation at a more fine-grained level. Instead of uniformly scaling the activation, we individually adjust each element within an activation and thus propose Element-Wise Activation Scaling, dubbed EWAS, to improve CNNs…
Pruning is a well-known mechanism for reducing the computational cost of deep convolutional networks. However, studies have shown the potential of pruning as a form of regularization, which reduces overfitting and improves generalization. We demonstrate that this family of strategies provides additional benefits beyond computational performance and generalization. Our analyses reveal that pruning structures (filters and/or layers) from convolutional networks increase not only generalization but also robustness to adversarial images (natural images with content modified). Such achievements are …
With the growing pace of using Deep Learning (DL) to solve various problems, securing these models against adversaries has become one of the main concerns of researchers. Recent studies have shown that DL-based malware detectors are vulnerable to adversarial examples. An adversary can create carefully crafted adversarial examples to evade DL-based malware detectors. In this paper, we propose Mal2GCN, a robust malware detection model that uses Function Call Graph (FCG) representation of executable files combined with Graph Convolution Network (GCN) to detect Windows malware. Since FCG represent…
Gesture-based authentication has emerged as a non-intrusive, effective means of authenticating users on mobile devices. Typically, such authentication techniques have relied on classical machine learning techniques, but recently, deep learning techniques have been applied this problem. Although prior research has shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, relatively little research has been done in the adversarial domain for behavioral biometrics. In this research, we collect tri-axial accelerometer gesture data (TAGD) from 46 users and perform classification experi…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have set benchmarks on a wide array of supervised learning tasks. Trained DNNs, however, often lack robustness to minor adversarial perturbations to the input, which undermines their true practicality. Recent works have increased the robustness of DNNs by fitting networks using adversarially-perturbed training samples, but the improved performance can still be far below the performance seen in non-adversarial settings. A significant portion of this gap can be attributed to the decrease in generalization performance due to adversarial training. In this work, we exten…
Southwest Petroleum University（西南石油大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are currently the most promising paradigm for dealing with graph-structure data, while recent studies have also shown that GCNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Thus developing GCN models that are robust to such attacks become a hot research topic. However, the structural purification learning-based or robustness constraints-based defense GCN methods are usually designed for specific data or attacks, and introduce additional objective that is not for classification. Extra training overhead is also required in their design. To address these challenges, …
This paper extensively evaluates the vulnerability of capsule networks to different adversarial attacks. Recent work suggests that these architectures are more robust towards adversarial attacks than other neural networks. However, our experiments show that capsule networks can be fooled as easily as convolutional neural networks.
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）
Recent studies have shown that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the graph structure. Although multiple works have been proposed to improve their robustness against such structural adversarial attacks, the reasons for the success of the attacks remain unclear. In this work, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that structural adversarial examples can be attributed to the non-robust aggregation scheme (i.e., the weighted mean) of GCNs. Specifically, our analysis takes advantage of the breakdown point which can quantitatively measure the robustn…
Though Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have surpassed human-level performance on tasks such as object classification and face verification, they can easily be fooled by adversarial attacks. These attacks add a small perturbation to the input image that causes the network to misclassify the sample. In this paper, we focus on neutralizing adversarial attacks by compact feature learning. In particular, we show that learning features in a closed and bounded space improves the robustness of the network. We explore the effect of L2-Softmax Loss, that enforces compactness in the learned features…
Univ. of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Digital Tech. Center（数字技术中心）
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are vulnerable to perturbations of the graph structure that are either random, or, adversarially designed. The perturbed links modify the graph neighborhoods, which critically affects the performance of GCNs in semi-supervised learning (SSL) tasks. Aiming at robustifying GCNs conditioned on the perturbed graph, the present paper generates multiple auxiliary graphs, each having its binary 0-1 edge weights flip values with probabilities designed to enhance robustness. The resultant edge-dithered auxiliary graphs are leveraged by an adaptive (A)GCN that perform…
Lumbar Spine Tumor Segmentation and Localization in T2 MRI Images Using AI
A. K. Choudhury School of Information Technology, University of Calcutta（加尔各答大学A.K.乔杜里信息技术学院）；Rammohan College, University of Calcutta（加尔各答大学拉莫汉学院）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究院）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Bosch Center for AI（博世人工智能中心）
Recent work has highlighted several advantages of enforcing orthogonality in the weight layers of deep networks, such as maintaining the stability of activations, preserving gradient norms, and enhancing adversarial robustness by enforcing low Lipschitz constants. Although numerous methods exist for enforcing the orthogonality of fully-connected layers, those for convolutional layers are more heuristic in nature, often focusing on penalty methods or limited classes of convolutions. In this work, we propose and evaluate an alternative approach to directly parameterize convolutional layers that …
Deep convolutional neural networks can be highly vulnerable to small perturbations of their inputs, potentially a major issue or limitation on system robustness when using deep networks as classifiers. In this paper we propose a low-cost method to explore marginal sample data near trained classifier decision boundaries, thus identifying potential adversarial samples. By finding such adversarial samples it is possible to reduce the search space of adversarial attack algorithms while keeping a reasonable successful perturbation rate. In our developed strategy, the potential adversarial samples r…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California at Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are powerful tools for graph-structured data. However, they have been recently shown to be vulnerable to topological attacks. To enhance adversarial robustness, we go beyond spectral graph theory to robust graph theory. By challenging the classical graph Laplacian, we propose a new convolution operator that is provably robust in the spectral domain and is incorporated in the GCN architecture to improve expressivity and interpretability. By extending the original graph to a sequence of graphs, we also propose a robust training paradigm that encourages transfe…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Despite their impressive performance, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to be sensitive to small adversarial perturbations. These nuisances, which one can barely notice, are powerful enough to fool sophisticated and well performing classifiers, leading to ridiculous misclassification results. In this paper we analyze the stability of state-of-the-art deep-learning classification machines to adversarial perturbations, where we assume that the signals belong to the (possibly multi-layer) sparse representation model. We start with convolutional sparsity and then proceed to…
