Paper:
Thwarting Adversarial Examples: An L 0 -Robust Sparse Fourier Transform
We give a new algorithm for approximating the Discrete Fourier transform of an approximately sparse signal that has been corrupted by worst-case L 0 noise, namely a bounded number of coordinates of the signal have been corrupted arbitrarily. Our techniques generalize to a wide range of linear transformations that are used in data analysis such as the Discrete Cosine and Sine transforms, the Hadamard transform, and their high-dimensional analogs. We use our algorithm to successfully defend against well known L 0 adversaries in the setting of image classification. We give experimental results on the Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack (JSMA) and the Carlini Wagner (CW) L 0 attack on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets as well as the Adversarial Patch on the ImageNet dataset.

Review:
The authors use tools from compressive sensing to defend classifiers against adversarial corruption of images with L0 constrained attacks. Specifically, assuming the input image is approximately sparse in the Fourier domain, they can approximately recover the adversarial perturbations and the large Fourier coefficients of the input image. They test their defense method on known L0 attacks and they are able to defend against these attacks.  I found their defense algorithm to be a clever use of compressive sensing. They show that the observed signal y is a matrix transform of the input and errors. They then show that this particular matrix satisfies the RIP condition for the input model of interest. Typically we show the RIP condition of random low-rank matrices. It was interesting to exploit the RIP condition of this particular deterministic and relatively high-rank matrix.  My issue with this work is that the theoretical results do not precisely imply defense against L0 attacks. It only shows that we can approximately recover the large Fourier coefficients of the image. While the proposed algorithm does defend against known attacks, perhaps with knowledge of the defense method it may be possible to still attack the classifier. For example in Figure 4 there are some large artifacts after the recovery. An attack may be able to exploit the artifacts left over after running the recovery algorithm.  Overall, I believe that this is a good contribution to the area with some nice ideas. However there is still work to be done and I would not be surprised if an attack is developed that can bypass this defense.  *** Post Rebuttal ***  Thank you for your response. Since this work only allows approximate recovery in L_inf, and we know that there exists adversarial examples in L_inf, I still think that an attacker with knowledge of the defense can still cause the network to output the wrong result. I still think that this work makes a nice contribution to the space.