Query-efficient Meta Attack to Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Jiawei Du, Hu Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Yi Yang, Jiashi Feng
Keywords: Adversarial attack, Meta learning
Abstract: Black-box attack methods aim to infer suitable attack patterns to targeted DNN models by only using output feedback of the models and the corresponding input queries. However, due to lack of prior and inefficiency in leveraging the query and feedback information, existing methods are mostly query-intensive for obtaining effective attack patterns. In this work, we propose a meta attack approach that is capable of attacking a targeted  model with much fewer queries. Its high query-efficiency stems from effective utilization of  meta learning approaches in learning generalizable prior abstraction from the previously observed attack patterns and exploiting  such prior to help infer attack patterns from only a few queries and outputs. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10 and tiny-Imagenet demonstrate that our meta-attack method can remarkably reduce the number of model queries without sacrificing the attack performance. Besides, the obtained meta attacker is not restricted to a particular model but can be used easily with a fast adaptive ability to attack a variety of models. Our code will be released to the public.