Title: THE LIMITATIONS OF ADVERSARIAL TRAINING AND THE BLIND-SPOT ATTACK

Abstract: The adversarial training procedure proposed by Madry et al. (2018) is one of the most effective methods to defend against adversarial examples in deep neural networks (DNNs). In our paper, we shed some lights on the practicality and the hardness of adversarial training by showing that the effectiveness (robustness on test set) of adversarial training has a strong correlation with the distance between a test point and the manifold of training data embedded by the network. Test examples that are relatively far away from this manifold are more likely to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Consequentially, an adversarial training based defense is susceptible to a new class of attacks, the "blind-spot attack", where the input images reside in "blind-spots" (low density regions) of the empirical distribution of training data but is still on the ground-truth data manifold. For MNIST, we found that these blind-spots can be easily found by simply scaling and shifting image pixel values. Most importantly, for large datasets with high dimensional and complex data manifold (CIFAR, ImageNet, etc), the existence of blind-spots in adversarial training makes defending on any valid test examples difficult due to the curse of dimensionality and the scarcity of training data. Additionally, we find that blind-spots also exist on provable defenses including (Kolter & Wong, 2018) and (Sinha et al., 2018) because these trainable robustness certificates can only be practically optimized on a limited set of training data.

1. INTRODUCTION:

Since the discovery of adversarial examples in deep neural networks (DNNs) (Szegedy et al., 2013) , adversarial training under the robustness optimization framework (Madry et al., 2018; Sinha et al., 2018) has become one of the most effective methods to defend against adversarial examples. A recent study by Athalye et al. (2018) showed that adversarial training does not rely on obfuscated gradients and delivers promising results for defending adversarial examples on small datasets. Adversarial training approximately solves the following min-max optimization problem:

EQUATION

)

where X is the set of training data, L is the loss function, θ is the parameter of the network, and S is usually a norm constrained p ball centered at 0. Madry et al. (2018) propose to use projected gradient descent (PGD) to approximately solve the maximization problem within S = {δ | δ ∞ ≤ }, where = 0.3 for MNIST dataset on a 0-1 pixel scale, and = 8 for CIFAR-10 dataset on a 0-255 pixel scale. This approach achieves impressive defending results on the MNIST test set: so far the best available white-box attacks by Zheng et al. (2018) can only decrease the test accuracy from approximately 98% to 88%1 . However, on CIFAR-10 dataset, a simple 20-step PGD can decrease the test accuracy from 87% to less than 50%2 .

The effectiveness of adversarial training is measured by the robustness on the test set. However, the adversarial training process itself is done on the training set. Suppose we can optimize (1) perfectly, then certified robustness may be obtained on those training data points. However, if the empirical distribution of training dataset differs from the true data distribution, a test point drawn from the true data distribution might lie in a low probability region in the empirical distribution of training dataset and is not "covered" by the adversarial training procedure. For datasets that are relatively simple and have low intrinsic dimensions (MNIST, Fashion MNIST, etc), we can obtain enough training examples to make sure adversarial training covers most part of the data distribution. For high dimensional datasets (CIFAR, ImageNet), adversarial training have been shown difficult (Kurakin et al., 2016; Tramèr et al., 2018) and only limited success was obtained.

A recent attack proposed by Song et al. (2018) shows that adversarial training can be defeated when the input image is produced by a generative model (for example, a generative adversarial network) rather than selected directly from the test examples. The generated images are well recognized by humans and thus valid images in the ground-truth data distribution. In our interpretation, this attack effective finds the "blind-spots" in the input space that the training data do not well cover.

For higher dimensional datasets, we hypothesize that many test images already fall into these blindspots of training data and thus adversarial training only obtains a moderate level of robustness. It is interesting to see that for those test images that adversarial training fails to defend, if their distances (in some metrics) to the training dataset are indeed larger. In our paper, we try to explain the success of robust optimization based adversarial training and show the limitations of this approach when the test points are slightly off the empirical distribution of training data. Our main contributions are:

• We show that on the original set of test images, the effectiveness of adversarial training is highly correlated with the distance (in some distance metrics) from the test image to the manifold of training images. For MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets, most test images are close to the training data and very good robustness is observed on these points. For CIFAR, there is a clear trend that the adversarially trained network gradually loses its robustness property when the test images are further away from training data. • We identify a new class of attacks, "blind-spot attacks", where the input image resides in a "blind-spot" of the empirical distribution of training data (far enough from any training examples in some embedding space) but is still in the ground-truth data distribution (well recognized by humans and correctly classified by the model). Adversarial training cannot provide good robustness on these blind-spots and their adversarial examples have small distortions. • We show that blind-spots can be easily found on a few strong defense models including Madry et al. (2018) , Kolter & Wong (2018) and Sinha et al. (2018) . We propose a few simple transformations (slightly changing contrast and background), that do not noticeably affect the accuracy of adversarially trained MNIST and Fashion MNIST models, but these models become vulnerable to adversarial attacks on these sets of transformed input images. These transformations effectively move the test images slightly out of the manifold of training images, which does not affect generalization but poses a challenge for robust learning.

Our results imply that current adversarial training procedures cannot scale to datasets with a large (intrinsic) dimension, where any practical amount of training data cannot cover all the blind-spots. This explains the limited success for applying adversarial training on ImageNet dataset, where many test images can be sufficiently far away from the empirical distribution of training dataset. (2017) . Some of these defense methods have been proven vulnerable or ineffective under strong attack methods such as C&W in Carlini & Wagner (2017) . Another category of recent defense methods is based on gradient masking or obfuscated gradient (Buckman et al. (2018) ; Ma et al. (2018) ; Guo et al. (2017) ; Song et al. (2017) ; Samangouei et al. (2018) ), but these methods are also successfully evaded by the stronger BPDA attack (Athalye et al. (2018) ). Randomization in DNNs (Dhillon et al., 2018; Xie et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2018) is also used to reduce the success rate of adversarial attacks, however, it usually incurs additional computational costs and still cannot fully defend against an adaptive attacker (Athalye et al., 2018; Athalye & Sutskever, 2017 ).

2. RELATED WORKS:

An 

2.2. ANALYZING ADVERSARIAL EXAMPLES:

Along with the attack-defense arms race, some insightful findings have been discovered to understand the natural of adversarial examples, both theoretically and experimentally. Schmidt et al. (2018) show that even for a simple data distribution of two class-conditional Gaussians, robust generalization requires significantly larger number of samples than standard generalization. Cullina et al. (2018) extend the well-known PAC learning theory to the case with adversaries, and derive the adversarial VC-dimension which can be either larger or smaller than the standard VC-dimension. Bubeck et al. (2018b) (Zhang et al., 2018; Dvijotham et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2018) . There might exist test images that are still within the capability of standard generalization (i.e., correctly classified by DNNs with high confidence, and well recognized by humans), but behaves badly in robust generalization (i.e., adversarial examples can be easily found with small distortions). Our paper complements those existing findings by showing the strong correlation between the effectiveness of adversarial defenses (both adversarial training and some certified defenses) and the distance between training data and test points. Additionally, we show that a tiny shift in input distribution (which may or may not be detectable in embedding space) can easily destroy the robustness property of an robust model.

3. METHODOLOGY:



3.1. MEASURING THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TRAINING DATASET AND A TEST DATA POINT:

To verify the correlation between the effectiveness of adversarial training and how close a test point is to the manifold of training dataset, we need to propose a reasonable distance metric between a test example and a set of training examples. However, defining a meaningful distance metric for high dimensional image data is a challenging problem. Naively using an Euclidean distance metric in the input space of images works poorly as it does not reflect the true distance between the images on their ground-truth manifold. One strategy is to use (kernel-)PCA, t-SNE (Maaten & Hinton, 2008) , or UMAP (McInnes & Healy, 2018) to reduce the dimension of training data to a low dimensional space, and then define distance in that space. These methods are sufficient for small and simple datasets like MNIST, but for more general and complicated dataset like CIFAR, extracting a meaningful low-dimensional manifold directly on the input space can be really challenging.

On the other hand, using a DNN to extract features of input images and measuring the distance in the deep feature embedding space has demonstrated better performance in many applications (Hu et al., 2014; 2015) , since DNN models can capture the manifold of image data much better than simple methods such as PCA or t-SNE. Although we can form an empirical distribution using kernel density estimation (KDE) on the deep feature embedding space and then obtain probability densities for test points, our experience showed that KDE work poorly in this case because the features extracted by DNNs are still high dimensional (hundreds or thousands dimensions).

Taking the above considerations into account, we propose a simple and intuitive distance metric using deep feature embeddings and k-nearest neighbour. Given a feature extraction neural network h(x), a set of n training data points X train = {x 1 train , x 2 train , • • • , x n train }, and a set of m test data points

X test = {x 1 test , x 2 test , • • • , x m

test } from the true data distribution, for each j ∈ [m], we define the following distance between x j test and X train :

D(x j test , X train ) := 1 k k i=1 h(x j test ) -h(x πj (i) train ) p (2)

where

π j : [n] → [n] is a permutation that {π j (1), π j (2), • • • , π j (n)

} is an ascending ordering of training data based on the p distance between x j test and x i train in the deep embedding space, i.e., ∀i < i , h(x j test ) -h(x

πj (i) train ) p ≤ h(x j test ) -h(x πj (i )

train ) p In other words, we average the embedding space distance of k nearest neighbors of x j in the training dataset. This simple metric is non-parametric and we found that the results are not sensitive to the selection of k; also, for naturally trained and adversarially trained feature extractors, the distance metrics obtained by different feature extractors reveal very similar correlations with the effectiveness of adversarial training.

3.2. MEASURING THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TRAINING AND TEST DATASETS:

We are also interested to investigate the "distance" between the training dataset and the test dataset to gain some insights on how adversarial training performs on the entire test set. Unlike the setting in Section 3.1, this requires to compute a divergence between two empirical data distributions.

Given n training data points

X train = {x 1 train , x 2 train , • • • , x n train } and m test data points X test = {x 1 test , x 2 test , • • • , x m

test }, we first apply a neural feature extractor h to them, which is the same as in Section 3.1. Then, we apply a non-linear projection (in our case, we use t-SNE) to project both h(x i train ) and h(x j test ) to a low dimensional space, and obtain xi train = proj(h(x i train )) and xj test = proj(h(x j test )). The dataset after feature extraction and projection is denoted as Xtrain and Xtest . Because xi train and xj test are low dimensional, we can use kernel density estimation (KDE) to form empirical distributions ptrain and ptest for them. We use p train and p test to denote the true distributions. Then, we approximate the K-L divergence between p train and p test via a numerical integration of Eq.(3):

EQUATION

where

ptrain (x) = 1 n n i=1 K(x -xi train ; H) and ptest (x) = 1 m m j=1 K(x -xj test ;

H) are the KDE density functions. K is the kernel function (specifically, we use the Gaussian kernel) and H is the bandwidth parameter automatically selected by Scott's rule (Scott, 2015) . V is chosen as a box bounding all training and test data points. For a multi-class dataset, we compute the aforementioned KDE and K-L divergence for each class separately.

3.3. THE BLIND-SPOT ATTACK: A NEW CLASS OF ADVERSARIAL ATTACKS:

Inspired by our findings of the negative correlation between the effectiveness of adversarial training and the distance between a test image and training dataset, we identify a new class of adversarial attacks called "blind-spot attacks", where we find input images that are "far enough" from any existing training examples such that:

• They are still drawn from the ground-truth data distribution (i.e. well recognized by humans)

and classified correctly by the model (within the generalization capability of the model); • Adversarial training cannot provide good robustness properties on these images, and we can easily find their adversarial examples with small distortions using a simple gradient based attack.

Importantly, blind-spot images are not adversarial images themselves. However, after performing adversarial attacks, we can find their adversarial examples with small distortions, despite adversarial training. In other words, we exploit the weakness in a model's robust generalization capability.

We find that these blind-spots are prevalent and can be easily found without resorting to complex generative models like in Song et al. (2018) . For the MNIST dataset which Madry et al. (2018) , Kolter & Wong (2018) and Sinha et al. (2018) demonstrate the strongest defense results so far, we propose a simple transformation to find the blind-spots in these models. We simply scale and shift each pixel value. Suppose the input image x ∈ [-0.5, 0.5] d , we scale and shift each test data example x element-wise to form a new example x :

x = αx + β, s.t. x ∈ [-0.5, 0.5] d

where α is a constant close to 1 and β is a constant close to 0. We make sure that the selection of α and β will result in a x that is still in the valid input range [-0.5, 0.5] d . This transformation effectively adjusts the contrast of the image, and/or adds a gray background to the image. We then perform Carlini & Wagner's attacks on these transformed images x to find their adversarial examples x adv . It is important that the blind-spot images x are still undoubtedly valid images; for example, a digit that is slightly darker than the one in test set is still considered as a valid digit and can be well recognized by humans. Also, we found that with appropriate α and β the accuracy of MNIST and Fashion-MNIST models barely decreases; the model has enough generalization capability for this set of slightly transformed images, yet their adversarial examples can be easily found. Using data augmentation may eliminate some blind-spots, however for high dimensional data it is impossible to enumerate all possible inputs due to the curse of dimensionality.

4.1. SETUP:

We conduct experiments on adversarially trained models by Madry et al. (2018) on four datasets: MNIST, Fashion MNIST, and CIFAR-10. For MNIST, we use the "secret" model release for the MNIST attack challenge3 . For CIFAR-10, we use the public "adversarially trained" model4 . For Fashion MNIST, we train our own model with the same model structure and parameters as the robust MNIST model, except that the iterative adversary is allowed to perturb each pixel by at most = 0.1 as a larger will significantly reduce model accuracy.

We use our presented simple blind-spot attack in Section 3.3 to find blind-spot images, and use Carlini & Wagner's (C&W's) ∞ attack (Carlini & Wagner (2017) ) to find their adversarial examples. We found that C&W's attacks generally find adversarial examples with smaller perturbations than projected gradient descent (PGD). To avoid gradient masking, we initial our attacks using two schemes: (1) from the original image plus a random Gaussian noise with a standard deviation of 0.2;

(2) from a blank gray image where all pixels are initialized as 0. A successful attack is defined as finding an perturbed example that changes the model's classification and the ∞ distortion is less than a given used for robust training. For MNIST, = 0.3; for Fashion-MNIST, = 0.1; and for CIFAR, = 8/255. All input images are normalized to [-0.5, 0.5].

4.2. EFFECTIVENESS OF ADVERSARIAL TRAINING AND THE DISTANCE TO TRAINING SET:

In this set of experiments, we build a connection between attack success rate on adversarially trained models and the distance between a test example and the whole training set. We use the metric defined in Section 3.1 to measure this distance. For MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, the outputs of the first fully connected layer (after all convolutional layers) are used as the neural feature extractor h(x); for CIFAR, we use the outputs of the last average pooling layer. We consider both naturally and adversarially trained networks as the neural feature extractor, with p = 2 and k = 5. The results are shown in Figure 1 As we can observe in all three figures, most successful attacks in test sets for adversarially trained networks concentrate on the right hand side of the distance distribution, and the success rates tend to grow when the distance is increasing. The trend is independent of the feature extractor being used (naturally or adversarially trained). The strong correlation between attack success rates and the distance from a test point to the training dataset supports our hypothesis that adversarial training tends to fail on test points that are far enough from the training data distribution. 

4.3. K-L DIVERGENCE BETWEEN TRAINING AND TEST SETS VS ATTACK SUCCESS RATE:

To quantify the overall distance between the training and the test set, we calculate the K-L divergence between the KDE distributions of training set and test set for each class according to Eq. ( 3). Then, for each dataset we take the average K-L divergence across all classes, as shown in Table 1 . We use both adversarially trained networks and naturally trained networks as our feature extractors h(x). Additionally, we also calculate the average normalized distance by calculating the 2 distance between each test point and the training set as in Section 4.2, and taking the average over all test points. To compare between different datasets, we normalize each element of the feature representation h(x) to mean 0 and variance 1. We average this distance among all test points and divide it by √ d t to normalize the dimension, where d t is the dimension of the feature representation h(•).

Clearly, Fashion-MNIST is the dataset with the strongest defense as measured by the attack success rates on test set, and its K-L divergence is also the smallest. For CIFAR, the divergence between training and test sets is significantly larger, and adversarial training only has limited success. The hardness of training a robust model for MNIST is in between Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR. Another important observation is that the effectiveness of adversarial training does not depend on the accuracy; for Fashion-MNIST, classification is harder as the data is more complicated than MNIST, but training a robust Fashion-MNIST model is easier as the data distribution is more concentrated and adversarial training has less "blind-spots".

4.4. BLIND-SPOT ATTACK ON MNIST AND FASHION MNIST:

In this section we focus on applying the proposed blind-spot attack to MNIST and Fashion MNIST. As mentioned in Section 3.3, for an image x from the test set, the blind-spot image x = αx + β Table 1 : Average K-L divergence and normalized 2 distance between training and test sets across all classes. We use both adversarially trained networks (adv.) and naturally trained networks (nat.) as our feature extractors when computing K-L divergence. Note that we only attack images that are correctly classified and report success rate on those images. obtained by scaling and shifting is considered as a new natural image, and we use the C&W ∞ attack to craft an adversarial image x adv for x . The attack distortion is calculated as the ∞ distance between x and x adv . For MNIST, = 0.3 so we set the scaling factor to α = {1.0, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7}.

For Fashion-MNIST, = 0.1 so we set the scaling factor to α = {1.0, 0.95, 0.9}. We set β to either 0 or a small constant. The case α = 1.0, β = 0.0 represents the original test set images. We report the model's accuracy and attack success rates for each choice of α and β in Table 2 and Table 3 .

Because we scale the image by a factor of α, we also set a stricter criterion of success -the ∞ perturbation must be less than α to be counted as a successful attack. For MNIST, = 0.3 and for Fashion-MNIST, = 0.1. We report both success criterion, and α in Tables 2 and 3 . We first observe that for all pairs of α and β the transformation does not affect the models' test accuracy at all. The adversarially trained model classifies these slightly scaled and shifted images very well, with test accuracy equivalent to the original test set. Visual comparisons in Figure 4 show that when α is close to 1 and β is close to 0, it is hard to distinguish the transformed images from the original images. On the other hand, according to Tables 2 and 3 , the attack success rates for those transformed test images are significantly higher than the original test images, for both the original criterion and the stricter criterion α . In Figure 4 , we can see that the ∞ adversarial perturbation α, β α = 1.0 α = 0.9 α = 0.8 α = 0.7 required is much smaller than the original image after the transformation. Thus, the proposed scale and shift transformations indeed move test images into blind-spots. More figures are in Appendix.

β = 0 β = 0 β = 0.05 β = 0 β = 0.1 β = 0 β = 0.

One might think that we can generally detect blind-spot attacks by observing their distances to the training dataset, using a metric similar to Eq. ( 2). Thus, we plot histograms for the distances between tests points and training dataset, for both original test images and those slightly transformed ones in Figure 5 . We set α = 0.7, β = 0 for MNIST and α = 0.9, β = 0 for Fashion-MNIST. Unfortunately, the differences in distance histograms for these blind-spot images are so tiny that we cannot reliably detect the change, yet the robustness property drastically changes on these transformed images.

5. CONCLUSION:

In this paper, we observe that the effectiveness of adversarial training is highly correlated with the characteristics of the dataset, and data points that are far enough from the distribution of training data are prone to adversarial attacks despite adversarial training. Following this observation, we defined a new class of attacks called "blind-spot attack" and proposed a simple scale-and-shift scheme for conducting blind-spot attacks on adversarially trained MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets with high success rates. Our findings suggest that adversarial training can be challenging due to the prevalence of blind-spots in high dimensional datasets.

6. APPENDIX 6.1 DISTANCE DISTRIBUTIONS UNDER DIFFERENT NEAREST NEIGHBOUR PARAMETERS k:

As discussed in Section 3.1, we use k-nearest neighbour in embedding space to measure the distance between a test example and the training set. In Section 4.2 we use k = 5. In this section we show that the choice of k does not have much influence on our results. We use the adversarially trained model on the CIFAR dataset as an example. In Figures 6, 7 and 8 we choose k = 10, 100, 1000, respectively. The results are similar to those we have shown in Figure 3 : a strong correlation between attack success rates and the distance from a test point to the training dataset. 

6.2. GERMAN TRAFFIC SIGN (GTS) DATASET:

We also studied the German Traffic Sign (GTS) (Houben et al., 2013) dataset. For GTS, we train our own model with the same model structure and parameters as the adversarially trained CIFAR model (Madry et al., 2018) . We set = 8/255 for adversarial training with PGD, and also use the same as the threshold of success. The results are shown in Figure 9 . The GTS model behaves similarly to the CIFAR model: attack success rates are much higher when the distances between the test example and the training dataset are larger.

6.3. MORE VISUALIZATION RESULTS:

We demonstrate more MNIST and Fashion-MNIST visualizations in Figure 10 . 

6.4. RESULTS ON OTHER ROBUST TRAINING METHODS:

In this section we demonstrate our experimental results on two other state-of-the-art certified defense methods, including convex adversarial polytope by Wong et al. (2018) and Kolter & Wong (2018) , and distributional robust optimization based adversarial training by Sinha et al. (2018) . Different from the adversarial training by Madry et al. (2018) , these two methods can provide a formal certification on the robustness of the model and provably improve robustness on the training dataset. However, they cannot practically guarantee non-trivial robustness on test data. We did not include other certified defenses like Raghunathan et al. (2018) and Hein & Andriushchenko (2017) because they are not applicable to multi-layer networks. For all defenses, we use their official implementations and pretrained models (if available). Figure 11 shows the results on CIFAR using the defenses in Wong et al. (2018) . Tables 4 and 5 show the blind-spot attack results on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST for robust models in Kolter & Wong (2018) and Sinha et al. (2018) , respectively. Figure 12 shows the blind-spot attack examples on Madry et al. (2018) , Kolter & Wong (2018) and Sinha et al. (2018) .

:

https://github.com/MadryLab/mnist_challenge

https://github.com/MadryLab/cifar10_challenge

EXPERIMENTSIn this section we present our experimental results on adversarially trained models byMadry et al. (2018). Results on certified defense models byKolter & Wong (2018);Wong et al. (2018) andSinha et al. (2018) are very similar and are demonstrated in Section 6.4 in the Appendix.

https://github.com/MadryLab/mnist_challenge

https://github.com/MadryLab/cifar10_challenge

Figures and Tables:

Figure 1: Attack success rate and distance distribution of MNIST model in Madry et al. (2018). Upper: C&W ∞ attack success rates, = 0.3. Lower: The distribution of the average 2 (embedding space) distance between the images in test set and the top-5 nearest images in training set.

Figure 2: Attack success rate and distance distribution of Fashion MNIST model trained using Madry et al. (2018). Upper: C&W ∞ attack success rate, = 0.1. Lower: The distribution of the average 2 (embedding space) distance between the images in test set and the top-5 nearest images in training set.

Figure 4: Blind-spot attacks on Fashion-MNIST and MNIST data with scaling and shifting on adversarially trained models (Madry et al., 2018). First row contains input images after scaling and shifting and the second row contains the found adversarial examples. "dist" represents the ∞ distortion of adversarial perturbations. The first rows of figures (a) and (d) represent the original test set images (α = 1.0, β = 0.0); first rows of figures (b), (c), (e), and (f) illustrate the images after transformation. Adversarial examples for these transformed images have small distortions.

Figure 5: The distribution of the 2 distance between the original and scaled images in test set and the top-5 nearest images (k = 5) in training set using distance metric defined in Eq. (2).

Figure 6: Attack success rates and distance distribution of the adversarially trained CIFAR model by Madry et al. (2018). Upper: C&W ∞ attack success rate, = 8/255. Lower: distribution of the average 2 (embedding space) distance between the images in test set and the top-10 (k = 10) nearest images in training set.

Figure 8: Attack success rates and distance distribution of the adversarially trained CIFAR model by Madry et al. (2018). Upper: C&W ∞ attack success rate, = 8/255. Lower: distribution of the average 2 (embedding space) distance between the images in test set and the top-1000 (k = 1000) nearest images in training set.

Although the blind-spot attack is beyond the threat model considered in adversarial training (e.g. ∞ norm constrained perturbations), our argument is that adversarial training (and some other defense methods with certifications only on training examples such asKolter & Wong (2018)) are unlikely to scale well to datasets that lie in a high dimensional manifold, as the limited training data only guarantees robustness near these training examples. The blind-spots are almost inevitable in high dimensional case. For example, in CIFAR-10, about 50% of test images are already in blind-spots and their adversarial examples with small distortions can be trivially found despite adversarial training.

Table content: <table/>

Attack success rate (suc. rate) and test accuracy (acc) of scaled and shifted MNIST. An attack is considered successful if its ∞ distortion is less than thresholds (th.) 0.3 or 0.3α.

Table content: <table><tr><td>α, β</td><td>α = 1.0 β = 0</td><td/><td>β = 0</td><td colspan="2">α = 0.95</td><td colspan="2">β = 0.025</td><td>β = 0</td><td colspan="2">α = 0.9</td><td>β = 0.05</td></tr><tr><td>acc</td><td>86.1%</td><td colspan="2">86.1%</td><td/><td/><td/><td>86.4%</td><td colspan="2">86.1%</td><td>86.2%</td></tr><tr><td>th.</td><td>0.1</td><td>0.1</td><td colspan="2">0.095</td><td colspan="2">0.1</td><td>0.095</td><td>0.1</td><td>0.09</td><td>0.1</td><td>0.09</td></tr><tr><td>suc. rate</td><td>6.40%</td><td colspan="9">11.25% 9.05% 22.55% 18.55% 25.70% 19.15% 62.60% 55.95%</td></tr></table>

Attack success rate (suc. rate) and test accuracy (acc) of scaled and shifted Fashion-MNIST. An attack is considered as successful if its ∞ distortion is less than threshold (th.) 0.1 or 0.1α.

Table content: <table/>

Peer review (iclr2019):
 In this paper, the authors associated with the generalization gap of robust adversarial training with the distance between the test point and the manifold of training data. A so-called *blind-spot attack* is proposed to show the weakness of robust adversarial training. Although the paper contains interesting ideas and empirical results, I have several concerns about the current version. a) In the paper, the authors mentioned that "This simple metric is non-parametric and we found that the results are not sensitive to the selection of k". Can authors provide more details, e.g., empirical results, about it? What is its rationale? b) In the paper, "We find that these blind-spots are prevalent and can be easily found without resorting to complex generative models like in Song et al. (2018). For the MNIST dataset which Madry et al. (2018) demonstrate the strongest defense results so far, we propose a simple transformation to find the blind-spots in this model." Can authors provide empirical comparison between blind-spot attacks and the work by Song et al. (2018), e.g., attack success rate & distortion? c) The linear transformation x^.prime = .alpha x + .beta yields a blind-spot attack which can defeat robust adversarial training. However, given the linear transformation, one can further modify the inner maximization (adv. example generation) in robust training framework so that the attack satisfies max_{.alpha, .beta} f(.alpha x + .beta) subject to .| .alpha x + .beta .|.leq .epsilon. In this case, robust training framework can defend blind-spot attacks, right? I agree with the authors that the generalization error is due to the mismatch between training data and test data distribution, however, I am not convinced that blind-spot attacks are effective enough to robust training. d) "Because we scale the image by a factor of .alpha, we also set a stricter criterion of success, ..., perturbation must be less than .alpha .epsilon to be counted as a successful attack." I did not get the point. Even if you have a scaling factor in x^.prime = .alpha x + .beta, the universal perturbation rule should still be | x - x^.prime |_.infty .leq .epsilon. The metric the authors used would result in a higher attack success rate, right?