Title: Attacking the Madry Defense Model with $L_1$-based Adversarial Examples,
Abstract: The Madry Lab recently hosted a competition designed to test the robustness
of their adversarially trained MNIST model. Attacks were constrained to perturb
each pixel of the input image by a scaled maximal $L_\infty$ distortion
$\epsilon$ = 0.3. This discourages the use of attacks which are not optimized
on the $L_\infty$ distortion metric. Our experimental results demonstrate that
by relaxing the $L_\infty$ constraint of the competition, the elastic-net
attack to deep neural networks (EAD) can generate transferable adversarial
examples which, despite their high average $L_\infty$ distortion, have minimal
visual distortion. These results call into question the use of $L_\infty$ as a
sole measure for visual distortion, and further demonstrate the power of EAD at
generating robust adversarial examples.