Recent studies show that widely used deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. Many advanced algorithms have been proposed to generate adversarial examples by leveraging the @math distance for penalizing perturbations. Researchers have explored different defense methods to defend against such adversarial attacks. While the effectiveness of @math distance as a metric of perceptual quality remains an active research area, in this paper we will instead focus on a different type of perturbation, namely spatial transformation, as opposed to manipulating the pixel values directly as in prior works. Perturbations generated through spatial transformation could result in large @math distance measures, but our extensive experiments show that such spatially transformed adversarial examples are perceptually realistic and more difficult to defend against with existing defense systems. This potentially provides a new direction in adversarial example generation and the design of corresponding defenses. We visualize the spatial transformation based perturbation for different examples and show that our technique can produce realistic adversarial examples with smooth image deformation. Finally, we visualize the attention of deep networks with different types of adversarial examples to better understand how these examples are interpreted.
@cite_2: Several machine learning models, including neural networks, consistently misclassify adversarial examples---inputs formed by applying small but intentionally worst-case perturbations to examples from the dataset, such that the perturbed input results in the model outputting an incorrect answer with high confidence. Early attempts at explaining this phenomenon focused on nonlinearity and overfitting. We argue instead that the primary cause of neural networks' vulnerability to adversarial perturbation is their linear nature. This explanation is supported by new quantitative results while giving the first explanation of the most intriguing fact about them: their generalization across architectures and training sets. Moreover, this view yields a simple and fast method of generating adversarial examples. Using this approach to provide examples for adversarial training, we reduce the test set error of a maxout network on the MNIST dataset.
Following the emergence of adversarial examples, various defense methods have been studied, including adversarial training , distillation , gradient masking and feature squeezing . However, these defenses can either be evaded by attacks or only provide marginal improvements . Among these defenses, adversarial training has achieved the state-of-the-art performance. @cite_2 proposed to use the fast gradient sign attack as an adversary to perform adversarial training, which is much faster, followed by ensemble adversarial training and projected gradient descent (PGD) adversarial training . In this work, we explicitly analyze how effective the spatial transformation based adversarial examples are under these adversarial training based defense methods.