Novel Concepts and Designs for Adversarial Attacks and Defenses
Creators: name: Naseer, Muzammal
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2021

description: Albeit displaying remarkable performance across a range of tasks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples which are carefully created to deceive these networks. This thesis first demonstrates that DNNs are vulnerable against adversarial attacks even when the attacker is unaware of the model architecture or the training data used to train the model and then proposes a number of novel approaches to improve the robustness of DNNs against challenging adversarial perturbations. Specifically for adversarial attacks, our work highlights how targeted and untargeted adversarial functions can be learned without access to the original data distribution, training mechanism, or label space of an attacked computer vision system. We demonstrate state-of-the-art cross-domain transferability of adversarial perturbations learned from paintings, cartoons, and medical scans to models trained on natural image datasets (such as ImageNet). In this manner, our work highlights an important vulnerability of deep neural networks which makes their deployment challenging in a real-world scenario. Against the threat of these adversarial attacks, we develop novel defense mechanisms that can be deployed with or without retraining the deep neural networks. To this end, we design two plug-and-play defense methods that can protect off-the-shelf pre-trained models without retraining. Specifically, we propose Neural Representation Purifier (NRP) and Local Gradient Smoothing (LGS) to defend against constrained and unconstrained attacks, respectively. NRP learns to purify adversarial noise spread across entire the input image, however, it still struggles against unconstrained attacks where an attacker hides an adversarial sticker preferably in the background without disturbing the original salient image information. We develop a mechanism to smooth local gradients in an input image to stabilize abnormal adversarial patterns introduced by the unconstrained attacks such as an adversarial patch. Robustifying model's parameter space that is retraining the model on adversarial examples is of equal importance. However, current adversarial training methods not only lose performance on the clean image samples (images without the adversarial noise) but also show poor generalization to natural image corruptions. We propose a style-based adversarial training that enhances the model robustness to adversarial attacks as well as natural corruptions. A model trained on our proposed stylized adversarial training shows better generalization to shifts in data distribution including natural image corruptions such as fog, rain, and contrast. One drawback of adversarial training is the loss of accuracy on clean image samples especially when the model size is small. To address this limitation, we design a meta-learning-based approach that takes advantage of universal (instance-agnostic) as well as local (instance-specific) perturbations to train small neural networks with feature regularization that leads to better robustness with minimal drop in performance on clean image samples. Adversarial training is useful if it can be deployed against unseen adversarial attacks. However, evaluating a certain adversarial training mechanism remains a challenging feat due to gradient masking, a phenomenon where adversarial robustness is high due to failed attack optimization. Finally, we develop a generic attack algorithm based on a novel guidance mechanism in order to expose any elusive robustness due to gradient masking. In short, this thesis outlines new methods to expose the vulnerability of DNNs against adversarial perturbations and then sets out to propose novel defense techniques with special advantages over state-of-the-art methods e.g., task-agnostic behavior, good performance against natural perturbations, and less impact on model accuracy on clean image samples.