One man's trash is another man's treasure: Resisting adversarial examples by adversarial examples

C Xiao, C Zheng - … of the IEEE/CVF Conference on …, 2020 - openaccess.thecvf.com
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and …, 2020openaccess.thecvf.com
Modern image classification systems are often built on deep neural networks, which suffer
from adversarial examples--images with deliberately crafted, imperceptible noise to mislead
the network's classification. To defend against adversarial examples, a plausible idea is to
obfuscate the network's gradient with respect to the input image. This general idea has
inspired a long line of defense methods. Yet, almost all of them have proven vulnerable. We
revisit this seemingly flawed idea from a radically different perspective. We embrace the …
Abstract
Modern image classification systems are often built on deep neural networks, which suffer from adversarial examples--images with deliberately crafted, imperceptible noise to mislead the network's classification. To defend against adversarial examples, a plausible idea is to obfuscate the network's gradient with respect to the input image. This general idea has inspired a long line of defense methods. Yet, almost all of them have proven vulnerable. We revisit this seemingly flawed idea from a radically different perspective. We embrace the omnipresence of adversarial examples and the numerical procedure of crafting them, and turn this harmful attacking process into a useful defense mechanism. Our defense method is conceptually simple: before feeding an input image for classification, transform it by finding an adversarial example on a pre-trained external model. We evaluate our method against a wide range of possible attacks. On both CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet datasets, our method is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, in comparison to adversarial training, our method offers lower training cost as well as stronger robustness.
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