This work studies the robust evaluation of iterative stochastic purification defenses under white-box adversarial attacks. Our key technical insight is that gradient checkpointing makes exact end-to-end gradient computation through long purification trajectories practical by trading additional recomputation for substantially lower memory usage. This enables full-gradient adaptive attacks against diffusion- and Langevin-based purification defenses, where prior evaluations often resort to approximate backpropagation due to memory constraints. These approximations can weaken the attack signal and risk overestimating robustness. In parallel, stochasticity in iterative purification is frequently under-controlled, even though different purification trajectories can substantially change reported robustness metrics. Building on this insight, we introduce a memory-efficient full-gradient evaluation framework for stochastic purification defenses. The framework combines checkpointed backpropagation with evaluation protocols that control stochastic variability, thereby reducing memory bottlenecks while preserving exact gradients. We evaluate diffusion-based purification and Langevin sampling with Energy-Based Models (EBMs), demonstrating that full-gradient attacks uncover vulnerabilities missed by approximate-gradient evaluations. Our framework yields stronger state-of-the-art $\ell_{\infty}$ and $\ell_{2}$ white-box attacks and further supports probing out-of-distribution robustness. Overall, our results show that exact-gradient evaluation is essential for reliable benchmarking of iterative stochastic defenses.
MagNet and "Efficient Defenses..." were recently proposed as a defense to adversarial examples. We find that we can construct adversarial examples that defeat these defenses with only a slight increase in distortion.
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…
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Michingan（密歇根大学）
Adversarial machine learning is a well-studied field of research where an adversary causes predictable errors in a machine learning algorithm through precise manipulation of the input. Numerous techniques have been proposed to harden machine learning algorithms and mitigate the effect of adversarial attacks. Of these techniques, adversarial training, which augments the training data with adversarial samples, has proven to be an effective defense with respect to a certain class of attacks. However, adversarial training is computationally expensive and its improvements are limited to a single mo…
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
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…
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…
Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which can mislead classifiers by adding imperceptible perturbations. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is their good transferability, making black-box attacks feasible in real-world applications. Due to the threat of adversarial attacks, many methods have been proposed to improve the robustness. Several state-of-the-art defenses are shown to be robust against transferable adversarial examples. In this paper, we propose a translation-invariant attack method to generate more transferable adversarial examples against the de…
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…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies（马里兰大学高级计算机研究所）
In recent years, deep neural network approaches have been widely adopted for machine learning tasks, including classification. However, they were shown to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations: carefully crafted small perturbations can cause misclassification of legitimate images. We propose Defense-GAN, a new framework leveraging the expressive capability of generative models to defend deep neural networks against such attacks. Defense-GAN is trained to model the distribution of unperturbed images. At inference time, it finds a close output to a given image which does not contain the adv…
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…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Designing effective defense against adversarial attacks is a crucial topic as deep neural networks have been proliferated rapidly in many security-critical domains such as malware detection and self-driving cars. Conventional defense methods, although shown to be promising, are largely limited by their single-source single-cost nature: The robustness promotion tends to plateau when the defenses are made increasingly stronger while the cost tends to amplify. In this paper, we study principles of designing multi-source and multi-cost schemes where defense performance is boosted from multiple def…
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…
Department of Computer Engineering, University of Central Flordia（中佛罗里达大学计算机工程系）；Tencent AI Lab at Seattle（腾讯西雅图人工智能实验室）
Deep learning algorithms and networks are vulnerable to perturbed inputs which is known as the adversarial attack. Many defense methodologies have been investigated to defend against such adversarial attack. In this work, we propose a novel methodology to defend the existing powerful attack model. We for the first time introduce a new attacking scheme for the attacker and set a practical constraint for white box attack. Under this proposed attacking scheme, we present the best defense ever reported against some of the recent strong attacks. It consists of a set of nonlinear function to process…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been enormously successful across a variety of prediction tasks. However, recent research shows that DNNs are particularly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which poses a serious threat to their applications in security-sensitive systems. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective defense algorithm Defense-VAE that uses variational autoencoder (VAE) to purge adversarial perturbations from contaminated images. The proposed method is generic and can defend white-box and black-box attacks without the need of retraining the original CNN classifiers, and can …
Conventional adversarial defenses reduce classification accuracy whether or not a model is under attacks. Moreover, most of image processing based defenses are defeated due to the problem of obfuscated gradients. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial defense which is a defensive transform for both training and test images inspired by perceptual image encryption methods. The proposed method utilizes a block-wise pixel shuffling method with a secret key. The experiments are carried out on both adaptive and non-adaptive maximum-norm bounded white-box attacks while considering obfuscated gra…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Deep learning image classification is vulnerable to adversarial attack, even if the attacker changes just a small patch of the image. We propose a defense against patch attacks based on partially occluding the image around each candidate patch location, so that a few occlusions each completely hide the patch. We demonstrate on CIFAR-10, Fashion MNIST, and MNIST that our defense provides certified security against patch attacks of a certain size.
We introduce a feature scattering-based adversarial training approach for improving model robustness against adversarial attacks. Conventional adversarial training approaches leverage a supervised scheme (either targeted or non-targeted) in generating attacks for training, which typically suffer from issues such as label leaking as noted in recent works. Differently, the proposed approach generates adversarial images for training through feature scattering in the latent space, which is unsupervised in nature and avoids label leaking. More importantly, this new approach generates perturbed imag…
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…
CAS Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Space Information（中国科学院电磁空间信息重点实验室）；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. Moreover, adversarial examples can be used to perform an attack on various kinds of DNN based systems, even if the adversary has no access to the underlying model. Many defense methods have been proposed, such as obfuscating gradients of the networks or detecting adversarial examples. However it is proved out that these defense methods are not effective or cannot …
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室（MERL））
In this paper, we study the problem of how to defend classifiers against adversarial attacks that fool the classifiers using subtly modified input data. In contrast to previous works, here we focus on the white-box adversarial defense where the attackers are granted full access to not only the classifiers but also defenders to produce as strong attacks as possible. In such a context we propose viewing a defender as a functional, a higher-order function that takes functions as its argument to represent a function space, rather than fixed functions conventionally. From this perspective, a defend…
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）
Machine learning models, especially neural network (NN) classifiers, are widely used in many applications including natural language processing, computer vision and cybersecurity. They provide high accuracy under the assumption of attack-free scenarios. However, this assumption has been defied by the introduction of adversarial examples -- carefully perturbed samples of input that are usually misclassified. Many researchers have tried to develop a defense against adversarial examples; however, we are still far from achieving that goal. In this paper, we design a Generative Adversarial Net (GAN…
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 …
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…
Recent studies have demonstrated that machine learning approaches like deep neural networks (DNNs) are easily fooled by adversarial attacks. Subtle and imperceptible perturbations of the data are able to change the result of deep neural networks. Leveraging vulnerable machine learning methods raises many concerns especially in domains where security is an important factor. Therefore, it is crucial to design defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks. For the task of image classification, unnoticeable perturbations mostly occur in the high-frequency spectrum of the image. In this paper, we …
Neural Network classifiers have been used successfully in a wide range of applications. However, their underlying assumption of attack free environment has been defied by adversarial examples. Researchers tried to develop defenses; however, existing approaches are still far from providing effective solutions to this evolving problem. In this paper, we design a generative adversarial net (GAN) based zero knowledge adversarial training defense, dubbed ZK-GanDef, which does not consume adversarial examples during training. Therefore, ZK-GanDef is not only efficient in training but also adaptive t…
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…
