We propose a test-time defense mechanism against adversarial attacks: imperceptible image perturbations that significantly alter the predictions of a model. Unlike existing methods that rely on feature filtering or smoothing, which can lead to information loss, we propose to "combat noise with noise" by leveraging stochastic resonance to enhance robustness while minimizing information loss. Our approach introduces small translational perturbations to the input image, aligns the transformed feature embeddings, and aggregates them before mapping back to the original reference image. This can be expressed in a closed-form formula, which can be deployed on diverse existing network architectures without introducing additional network modules or fine-tuning for specific attack types. The resulting method is entirely training-free, architecture-agnostic, and attack-agnostic. Empirical results show state-of-the-art robustness on image classification and, for the first time, establish a generic test-time defense for dense prediction tasks, including stereo matching and optical flow, highlighting the method's versatility and practicality. Specifically, relative to clean (unperturbed) performance, our method recovers up to 68.1% of the accuracy loss on image classification, 71.9% on stereo matching, and 29.2% on optical flow under various types of adversarial attacks.
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…
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…
I introduce a very simple method to defend against adversarial examples. The basic idea is to raise the slope of the ReLU function at the test time. Experiments over MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed defense against a number of strong attacks in both untargeted and targeted settings. While perhaps not as effective as the state of the art adversarial defenses, this approach can provide insights to understand and mitigate adversarial attacks. It can also be used in conjunction with other defenses.
Dataset bias is a problem in adversarial machine learning, especially in the evaluation of defenses. An adversarial attack or defense algorithm may show better results on the reported dataset than can be replicated on other datasets. Even when two algorithms are compared, their relative performance can vary depending on the dataset. Deep learning offers state-of-the-art solutions for image recognition, but deep models are vulnerable even to small perturbations. Research in this area focuses primarily on adversarial attacks and defense algorithms. In this paper, we report for the first time, a …
Under adversarial attacks, time series regression and classification are vulnerable. Adversarial defense, on the other hand, can make the models more resilient. It is important to evaluate how vulnerable different time series models are to attacks and how well they recover using defense. The sensitivity to various attacks and the robustness using the defense of several time series models are investigated in this study. Experiments are run on seven-time series models with three adversarial attacks and one adversarial defense. According to the findings, all models, particularly GRU and RNN, appe…
Adversarial attacks optimize against models to defeat defenses. Existing defenses are static, and stay the same once trained, even while attacks change. We argue that models should fight back, and optimize their defenses against attacks at test time. We propose dynamic defenses, to adapt the model and input during testing, by defensive entropy minimization (dent). Dent alters testing, but not training, for compatibility with existing models and train-time defenses. Dent improves the robustness of adversarially-trained defenses and nominally-trained models against white-box, black-box, and adap…
Emergence of the utility of 3D point cloud data in safety-critical vision tasks (e.g., ADAS) urges researchers to pay more attention to the robustness of 3D representations and deep networks. To this end, we develop an attack and defense scheme, dedicated to 3D point cloud data, for preventing 3D point clouds from manipulated as well as pursuing noise-tolerable 3D representation. A set of novel 3D point cloud attack operations are proposed via pointwise gradient perturbation and adversarial point attachment / detachment. We then develop a flexible perturbation-measurement scheme for 3D point c…
Although 3D point cloud classification has recently been widely deployed in different application scenarios, it is still very vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This increases the importance of robust training of 3D models in the face of adversarial attacks. Based on our analysis on the performance of existing adversarial attacks, more adversarial perturbations are found in the mid and high-frequency components of input data. Therefore, by suppressing the high-frequency content in the training phase, the models robustness against adversarial examples is improved. Experiments showed that the pr…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯撒斯劳滕工业大学）
The adversarial vulnerability of deep networks has spurred the interest of researchers worldwide. Unsurprisingly, like images, adversarial examples also translate to time-series data as they are an inherent weakness of the model itself rather than the modality. Several attempts have been made to defend against these adversarial attacks, particularly for the visual modality. In this paper, we perform detailed benchmarking of well-proven adversarial defense methodologies on time-series data. We restrict ourselves to the $L_{\infty}$ threat model. We also explore the trade-off between smoothness …
DIFFender: Diffusion-Based Adversarial Defense against Patch Attacks
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能学院）；Tsinghua-Bosch Joint ML Center, Tsinghua University（清华大学-博世联合机器学习中心）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；RealAI
Convolutional Neural Networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are known to locate in subspaces close to where normal data lies but are not naturally occurring and of low probability. In this work, we investigate the potential effect defense techniques have on the geometry of the likelihood landscape - likelihood of the input images under the trained model. We first propose a way to visualize the likelihood landscape leveraging an energy-based model interpretation of discriminative classifiers. Then we introduce a measure to quantify the flatness of the likelihoo…
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；AWS AI Labs（AWS 人工智能实验室）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Open-set recognition and adversarial defense study two key aspects of deep learning that are vital for real-world deployment. The objective of open-set recognition is to identify samples from open-set classes during testing, while adversarial defense aims to defend the network against images with imperceptible adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we show that open-set recognition systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Furthermore, we show that adversarial defense mechanisms trained on known classes do not generalize well to open-set samples. Motivated by this observation, we empha…
Defense without Forgetting: Continual Adversarial Defense with Anisotropic & Isotropic Pseudo Replay
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies（广东省新型安全智能技术重点实验室）
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）；State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing（数学工程与先进计算国家重点实验室）；Qilu University of Technology（齐鲁工业大学）
The vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples has been confirmed. Existing adversarial defenses primarily aim at preventing adversarial examples from attacking DNNs successfully, rather than preventing their generation. If the generation of adversarial examples is unregulated, images within reach are no longer secure and pose a threat to non-robust DNNs. Although gradient obfuscation attempts to address this issue, it has been shown to be circumventable. Therefore, we propose a novel adversarial defense mechanism, which is referred to as immune defense and is the exa…
Though deep neural networks perform challenging tasks excellently, they are susceptible to adversarial examples, which mislead classifiers by applying human-imperceptible perturbations on clean inputs. Under the query-free black-box scenario, adversarial examples are hard to transfer to unknown models, and several methods have been proposed with the low transferability. To settle such issue, we design a max-min framework inspired by input transformations, which are benificial to both the adversarial attack and defense. Explicitly, we decrease loss values with inputs' affline transformations as…
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）；Everyday Robots（日常机器人公司）
Adaptive defenses, which optimize at test time, promise to improve adversarial robustness. We categorize such adaptive test-time defenses, explain their potential benefits and drawbacks, and evaluate a representative variety of the latest adaptive defenses for image classification. Unfortunately, none significantly improve upon static defenses when subjected to our careful case study evaluation. Some even weaken the underlying static model while simultaneously increasing inference computation. While these results are disappointing, we still believe that adaptive test-time defenses are a promis…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；ABB Corporate Research Center（ABB企业研究中心）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex人工智能研究院）
Deep Neural Network classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attack, where an imperceptible perturbation could result in misclassification. However, the vulnerability of DNN-based image ranking systems remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose two attacks against deep ranking systems, i.e., Candidate Attack and Query Attack, that can raise or lower the rank of chosen candidates by adversarial perturbations. Specifically, the expected ranking order is first represented as a set of inequalities, and then a triplet-like objective function is designed to obtain the optimal perturbation. C…
Adversarial attacks hamper the functionality and accuracy of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) by meddling with subtle perturbations to their inputs.In this work, we propose a new Mask-based Adversarial Defense scheme (MAD) for DNNs to mitigate the negative effect from adversarial attacks. To be precise, our method promotes the robustness of a DNN by randomly masking a portion of potential adversarial images, and as a result, the %classification result output of the DNN becomes more tolerant to minor input perturbations. Compared with existing adversarial defense techniques, our method does not need…
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…
Machine learning models have demonstrated vulnerability to adversarial attacks, more specifically misclassification of adversarial examples. In this paper, we investigate an attack-agnostic defense against adversarial attacks on high-resolution images by detecting suspicious inputs. The intuition behind our approach is that the essential characteristics of a normal image are generally consistent with non-essential style transformations, e.g., slightly changing the facial expression of human portraits. In contrast, adversarial examples are generally sensitive to such transformations. In our app…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Alibaba DAMO MIIL（阿里巴巴达摩院）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；HERE Technologies（HERE技术公司）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex人工智能研究院）
Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attack, where an imperceptible perturbation could result in misclassification. However, the vulnerability of DNN-based image ranking systems remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose two attacks against deep ranking systems, i.e., Candidate Attack and Query Attack, that can raise or lower the rank of chosen candidates by adversarial perturbations. Specifically, the expected ranking order is first represented as a set of inequalities, and then a triplet-like objective function is designed to obtain the optimal perturbat…
Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Despite the recent advances in a wide spectrum of applications, machine learning models, especially deep neural networks, have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Attackers add carefully-crafted perturbations to input, where the perturbations are almost imperceptible to humans, but can cause models to make wrong predictions. Techniques to protect models against adversarial input are called adversarial defense methods. Although many approaches have been proposed to study adversarial attacks and defenses in different scenarios, an intriguing and crucial challenge remains that how…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）
Deep learning based image classification models are shown vulnerable to adversarial attacks by injecting deliberately crafted noises to clean images. To defend against adversarial attacks in a training-free and attack-agnostic manner, this work proposes a novel and effective reconstruction-based defense framework by delving into deep image prior (DIP). Fundamentally different from existing reconstruction-based defenses, the proposed method analyzes and explicitly incorporates the model decision process into our defense. Given an adversarial image, firstly we map its reconstructed images during…
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…
Existing defenses against adversarial attacks are typically tailored to a specific perturbation type. Using adversarial training to defend against multiple types of perturbation requires expensive adversarial examples from different perturbation types at each training step. In contrast, manifold-based defense incorporates a generative network to project an input sample onto the clean data manifold. This approach eliminates the need to generate expensive adversarial examples while achieving robustness against multiple perturbation types. However, the success of this approach relies on whether t…
There has been extensive research on developing defense techniques against adversarial attacks; however, they have been mainly designed for specific model families or application domains, therefore, they cannot be easily extended. Based on the design philosophy of ensemble of diverse weak defenses, we propose ATHENA---a flexible and extensible framework for building generic yet effective defenses against adversarial attacks. We have conducted a comprehensive empirical study to evaluate several realizations of ATHENA with four threat models including zero-knowledge, black-box, gray-box, and whi…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve remarkable performance for tasks on graph data. However, recent works show they are extremely vulnerable to adversarial structural perturbations, making their outcomes unreliable. In this paper, we propose DefenseVGAE, a novel framework leveraging variational graph autoencoders(VGAEs) to defend GNNs against such attacks. DefenseVGAE is trained to reconstruct graph structure. The reconstructed adjacency matrix can reduce the effects of adversarial perturbations and boost the performance of GCNs when facing adversarial attacks. Our experiments on a number of …
Neural Networks are infamously sensitive to small perturbations in their inputs, making them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This project evaluates the performance of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) as a purification technique to defend against adversarial attacks. This works by adding noise to an adversarial example before removing it through the reverse process of the diffusion model. We evaluate the approach on the PatchCamelyon data set for histopathologic scans of lymph node sections and find an improvement of the robust accuracy by up to 88\% of the original model's ac…
