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Title: Black-Box Adversarial Attack with Transferable Model-based Embedding

Paper content:
We present a new method for black-box adversarial attack.
Unlike previous methods that combined transfer-based and scored-based methods by using the gradient or initialization of a surrogate white-box model, this new method tries to learn a low-dimensional embedding using a pretrained model, and then performs efficient search within the embedding space to attack an unknown target network.
The method produces adversarial perturbations with high level semantic patterns that are easily transferable.
We show that this approach can greatly improve the query efficiency of black-box adversarial attack across different target network architectures.
We evaluate our approach on MNIST, ImageNet and Google Cloud Vision API, resulting in a significant reduction on the number of queries.
We also attack adversarially defended networks on CIFAR10 and ImageNet, where our method not only reduces the number of queries, but also improves the attack success rate.
The wide adoption of neural network models in modern applications has caused major security concerns, as such models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples that can fool neural networks to make wrong predictions (Szegedy et al., 2014) .
Methods to attack neural networks can be divided into two categories based on whether the parameters of the neural network are assumed to be known to the attacker: white-box attack and black-box attack.
There are several approaches to find adversarial examples for black-box neural networks.
The transfer-based attack methods first pretrain a source model and then generate adversarial examples using a standard white-box attack method on the source model to attack an unknown target network (Goodfellow et al., 2015; Madry et al., 2018; Carlini & Wagner, 2017; Papernot et al., 2016a) .
The score-based attack requires a loss-oracle, which enables the attacker to query the target network at multiple points to approximate its gradient.
The attacker can then apply the white-box attack techniques with the approximated gradient (Chen et al., 2017; Ilyas et al., 2018a; Tu et al., 2018) .
A major problem of the transfer-based attack is that it can not achieve very high success rate.
And transfer-based attack is weak in targeted attack.
On the contrary, the success rate of score-based attack has only small gap to the white-box attack but it requires many queries.
Thus, it is natural to combine the two black-box attack approaches, so that we can take advantage of a pretrained white-box source neural network to perform more efficient search to attack an unknown target black-box model.
In fact, in the recent NeurIPS 2018 Adversarial Vision Challenge (Brendel et al., 2018) , many teams transferred adversarial examples from a source network as the starting point to carry out black-box boundary attack (Brendel et al., 2017) .
N Attack also used a regression network as initialization in the score-based attack (Li et al., 2019a) .
The transferred adversarial example could be a good starting point that lies close to the decision boundary for the target network and accelerate further optimization.
P-RGF (Cheng et al., 2019) used the gradient information from the source model to accelerate searching process.
However, gradient information is localized and sometimes it is misleading.
In this paper, we push the idea of using a pretrained white-box source network to guide black-box attack significantly further, by proposing a method called TRansferable EMbedding based Black-box Attack (TREMBA).
TREMBA contains two stages: (1) train an encoder-decoder that can effectively generate adversarial perturbations for the source network with a low-dimensional embedding space; (2) apply NES (Natural Evolution Strategy) of (Wierstra et al., 2014) to the low-dimensional embedding space of the pretrained generator to search adversarial examples for the target network.
TREMBA uses global information of the source model, capturing high level semantic adversarial features that are insensitive to different models.
Unlike noise-like perturbations, such perturbations would have much higher transferablity across different models.
Therefore we could gain query efficiency by performing queries in the embedding space.
We note that there have been a number of earlier works on using generators to produce adversarial perturbations in the white-box setting (Baluja & Fischer, 2018; Xiao et al., 2018; Wang & Yu, 2019) .
While black-box attacks were also considered there, they focused on training generators with dynamic distillation.
These early approaches required many queries to fine-tune the classifier for different target networks, which may not be practical for real applications.
While our approach also relies on a generator, we train it as an encoder-decoder that produces a low-dimensional embedding space.
By applying a standard black-box attack method such as NES on the embedding space, adversarial perturbations can be found efficiently for a target model.
It is worth noting that the embedding approach has also been used in AutoZOOM (Tu et al., 2018) .
However, it only trained the autoencoder to reconstruct the input, and it did not take advantage of the information of a pretrained network.
Although it also produces structural perturbations, these perturbations are usually not suitable for attacking regular networks and sometimes its performance is even worse than directly applying NES to the images (Cheng et al., 2019; Guo et al., 2019) .
TREMBA, on the other hand, tries to learn an embedding space that can efficiently generate adversarial perturbations for a pretrained source network.
Compared to AutoZOOM, our new method produces adversarial perturbation with high level semantic features that could hugely affect arbitrary target networks, resulting in significantly lower number of queries.
We summarize our contributions as follows:
1. We propose TREMBA, an attack method that explores a novel way to utilize the information of a pretrained source network to improve the query efficiency of black-box attack on a target network.
2. We show that TREMBA can produce adversarial perturbations with high level semantic patterns, which are effective across different networks, resulting in much lower queries on MNIST and ImageNet especially for the targeted attack that has low transferablity.
3. We demonstrate that TREMBA can be applied to SOTA defended models (Madry et al., 2018; Xie et al., 2018) .
Compared with other black-box attacks, TREMBA increases success rate by approximately 10% while reduces the number of queries by more than 50%.
We propose a novel method, TREMBA, to generate likely adversarial patterns for an unknown network.
The method contains two stages: (1) training an encoder-decoder to generate adversarial perturbations for the source network; (2) search adversarial perturbations on the low-dimensional embedding space of the generator for any unknown target network.
Compared with SOTA methods, TREMBA learns an embedding space that is more transferable across different network architectures.
It achieves two to six times improvements in black-box adversarial attacks on MNIST and ImageNet and it is especially efficient in performing targeted attack.
Furthermore, TREMBA demonstrates great capability in attacking defended networks, resulting in a nearly 10% improvement on the attack success rate, with two to six times of reductions in the number of queries.
TREMBA opens up new ways to combine transfer-based and score-based attack methods to achieve higher efficiency in searching adversarial examples.
For targeted attack, TREMBA requires different generators to attack different classes.
We believe methods from conditional image generation (Mirza & Osindero, 2014 ) may be combined with TREMBA to form a single generator that could attack multiple targeted classes.
We leave it as a future work.
A EXPERIMENT RESULT A.1
TARGETED ATTACK ON IMAGENET Figure 9 shows result of the targeted attack on dipper, American chameleon, night snake, ruffed grouse and black swan.
TREMBA achieves much higher success rate than other methods at almost all queries level.

assistant: text: We present a new method that combines transfer-based and scored black-box adversarial attack, improving the success rate and query efficiency of black-box adversarial attack across different network architectures.