Fooling Vision and Language Models Despite Localization and Attention
  Mechanism
  Adversarial attacks are known to succeed on classifiers, but it has been an
open question whether more complex vision systems are vulnerable. In this
paper, we study adversarial examples for vision and language models, which
incorporate natural language understanding and complex structures such as
attention, localization, and modular architectures. In particular, we
investigate attacks on a dense captioning model and on two visual question
answering (VQA) models. Our evaluation shows that we can generate adversarial
examples with a high success rate (i.e., > 90%) for these models. Our work
sheds new light on understanding adversarial attacks on vision systems which
have a language component and shows that attention, bounding box localization,
and compositional internal structures are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
These observations will inform future work towards building effective defenses.
