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Title: Enhancing Transformation-Based Defenses Against Adversarial Attacks with a Distribution Classifier

Paper content:
Adversarial attacks on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have gained significant attention and there have been active research efforts on defense mechanisms.
Stochastic input transformation methods have been proposed, where the idea is to recover the image from adversarial attack by random transformation, and to take the majority vote as consensus among the random samples.
However, the transformation improves the accuracy on adversarial images at the expense of the accuracy on clean images.
While it is intuitive that the accuracy on clean images would deteriorate, the exact mechanism in which how this occurs is unclear.
In this paper, we study the distribution of softmax induced by stochastic transformations.
We observe that with random transformations on the clean images, although the mass of the softmax distribution could shift to the wrong class, the resulting distribution of softmax could be used to correct the prediction.
Furthermore, on the adversarial counterparts, with the image transformation, the resulting shapes of the distribution of softmax are similar to the distributions from the clean images.
With these observations, we propose a method to improve existing transformation-based defenses.
We train a separate lightweight distribution classifier to recognize distinct features in the distributions of softmax outputs of transformed images.
Our empirical studies show that our distribution classifier, by training on distributions obtained from clean images only, outperforms majority voting for both clean and adversarial images.
Our method is generic and can be integrated with existing transformation-based defenses.
There has been widespread use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in many critical real-life applications such as facial recognition (Parkhi et al., 2015) and self-driving cars (Jung et al., 2016) .
However, it has been found that CNNs could misclassify the input image when the image has been corrupted by an imperceptible change (Szegedy et al., 2013) .
In other words, CNNs are not robust to small, carefully-crafted image perturbations.
Such images are called adversarial examples and there have been active research efforts in designing attacks that show the susceptibility of CNNs.
Correspondingly, many defense methods that aim to increase robustness to attacks have been proposed.
Stochastic transformation-based defenses have shown considerable success in recovering from adversarial attacks.
Under these defenses, the input image is transformed in a certain way before feeding into the CNN, such that the transformed adversarial image would no longer be adversarial.
As the transformation is random, by feeding in samples of the transformed image through the CNN, we accumulate a set of CNN softmax outputs and predictions.
As such, existing transformationbased defenses take a majority vote of the CNN predictions from the randomly transformed image (Prakash et al., 2018; Guo et al., 2017) .
Transformation-based defenses are desirable as there is no need to retrain the CNN model.
However, they suffer from deterioration of performance on clean images.
With increasing number of pixel deflections (Prakash et al., 2018) , there is improvement on the performance on adversarial images, but this comes with a rapid deterioration of performance on clean images.
In transformation-based defenses, the image is transformed stochastically where each sample t x is drawn from the distribution T (x) and then fed to the CNN (blue box).
In our defense method, for each input image x, we build the marginal distribution of softmax probabilities from the transformed samples t
(1)
x , · · · .
The distributions are fed to a separate distribution classifier which performs the final classification.
Note that our distribution classifier is trained only on distributions obtained from clean images while tested on both clean and adversarial images.
The exact mechanism of the deterioration in performance on clean images is unclear.
We believe that the softmax distribution induced by the random transformation contains rich information which is not captured by majority vote that simply counts the final class predictions from the transformed samples.
Now, an interesting question is whether the features in the distribution of softmax could be better utilized.
In this paper, to elucidate how the deterioration in accuracy on clean images occurs, we study the effects of the random image transformations on the distribution of the softmax outputs and make some key observations.
After the image transform, some clean images show distributions of softmax with modes at an incorrect class, reflecting the deterioration in voting accuracy as observed before.
While the shifting of the distribution mode to the incorrect class is detrimental to the voting prediction, the resulting distribution of softmax contains features that is useful for correcting the prediction.
In addition, we observe that the adversarial counterparts show similar shifts in the distributions of softmax as the clean images.
We also look into the distribution shapes for the transformed clean and adversarial images and find that they are similar.
With these observations, we propose a simple method to improve existing transformation-based defenses, as illustrated in Figure 1 .
We train a separate lightweight distribution classifier to recognize distinct features in the distributions of softmax outputs of transformed clean images and predict the class label.
Without retraining the original CNN, our distribution classifier improves the performance of transformation-based defenses on both clean and adversarial images.
On the MNIST dataset, the improvements in accuracy over majority voting are 1.7% and 5.9% on the clean and adversarial images respectively.
On CIFAR10, the improvements are 6.4% and 3.6% respectively.
Note that the distributions obtained from the adversarial images are not included in the training of the distribution classifier.
In real-world settings, the type of attack is not known beforehand.
Training the distribution classifier on a specific attack may cause the classifier to overfit to that attack.
Hence, it is an advantage that our defense method is attack-agnostic.
Our experimental findings show that the features of the distribution in the softmax are useful and can be used to improve existing transformation-based defenses.
Our contributions are as follows:
1. We analyze the effects of image transformation in existing defenses on the softmax outputs for clean and adversarial images, with a key finding that the distributions of softmax obtained from clean and adversarial images share similar features.
2. We propose a method that trains a distribution classifier on the distributions of the softmax outputs of transformed clean images only, but show improvements in both clean and adversarial images.
This method is agnostic to the attack method, does not require retraining of the CNN and can be integrated with existing transformation-based methods.
In the following section, we describe our experimental setup to evaluate the performance on clean and adversarial images with our distribution classifier method.
Adversarial attacks on convolutional neural networks have gained significant research attention and stochastic input transformation defenses have been proposed.
However, with transformation-based defenses, the performance on clean images deteriorates and the exact mechanism in which how this happens is unclear.
In this paper, we conduct in-depth analysis on the effects of stochastic transformation-based defenses on the softmax outputs of clean and adversarial images.
We observe that after image transformation, the distributions of softmax obtained from clean and adversarial images share similar distinct features.
Exploiting this property, we propose a method that trains a distribution classifier on the distributions of the softmax outputs of transformed clean images only, but show improvements in both clean and adversarial images over majority voting.
In our current work, we have considered untargeted attacks on the CNN and it is interesting to test our distribution classifier method with targeted attacks.

assistant: text: We enhance existing transformation-based defenses by using a distribution classifier on the distribution of softmax obtained from transformed images.