Title: Machine vs Machine: Minimax-Optimal Defense Against Adversarial Examples,
Abstract: Recently, researchers have discovered that the state-of-the-art object
classifiers can be fooled easily by small perturbations in the input
unnoticeable to human eyes. It is also known that an attacker can generate
strong adversarial examples if she knows the classifier parameters. Conversely,
a defender can robustify the classifier by retraining if she has access to the
adversarial examples. We explain and formulate this adversarial example problem
as a two-player continuous zero-sum game, and demonstrate the fallacy of
evaluating a defense or an attack as a static problem. To find the best
worst-case defense against whitebox attacks, we propose a continuous minimax
optimization algorithm. We demonstrate the minimax defense with two types of
attack classes -- gradient-based and neural network-based attacks. Experiments
with the MNIST and the CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that the defense found by
numerical minimax optimization is indeed more robust than non-minimax defenses.
We discuss directions for improving the result toward achieving robustness
against multiple types of attack classes.