Rethinking Model Ensemble in Transfer-based Adversarial Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Huanran, Zhang, Yichi, Dong, Yinpeng, Yang, Xiao, Su, Hang, Zhu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Chen, Huanran
Zhang, Yichi
Dong, Yinpeng
Yang, Xiao
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
author_facet Chen, Huanran
Zhang, Yichi
Dong, Yinpeng
Yang, Xiao
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
contents It is widely recognized that deep learning models lack robustness to adversarial examples. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is that they can transfer across different models, which enables black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim model. An effective strategy to improve the transferability is attacking an ensemble of models. However, previous works simply average the outputs of different models, lacking an in-depth analysis on how and why model ensemble methods can strongly improve the transferability. In this paper, we rethink the ensemble in adversarial attacks and define the common weakness of model ensemble with two properties: 1) the flatness of loss landscape; and 2) the closeness to the local optimum of each model. We empirically and theoretically show that both properties are strongly correlated with the transferability and propose a Common Weakness Attack (CWA) to generate more transferable adversarial examples by promoting these two properties. Experimental results on both image classification and object detection tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach to improving the adversarial transferability, especially when attacking adversarially trained models. We also successfully apply our method to attack a black-box large vision-language model -- Google's Bard, showing the practical effectiveness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/AdversarialAttacks}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_09105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Model Ensemble in Transfer-based Adversarial Attacks
Chen, Huanran
Zhang, Yichi
Dong, Yinpeng
Yang, Xiao
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
It is widely recognized that deep learning models lack robustness to adversarial examples. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is that they can transfer across different models, which enables black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim model. An effective strategy to improve the transferability is attacking an ensemble of models. However, previous works simply average the outputs of different models, lacking an in-depth analysis on how and why model ensemble methods can strongly improve the transferability. In this paper, we rethink the ensemble in adversarial attacks and define the common weakness of model ensemble with two properties: 1) the flatness of loss landscape; and 2) the closeness to the local optimum of each model. We empirically and theoretically show that both properties are strongly correlated with the transferability and propose a Common Weakness Attack (CWA) to generate more transferable adversarial examples by promoting these two properties. Experimental results on both image classification and object detection tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach to improving the adversarial transferability, especially when attacking adversarially trained models. We also successfully apply our method to attack a black-box large vision-language model -- Google's Bard, showing the practical effectiveness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/AdversarialAttacks}.
title Rethinking Model Ensemble in Transfer-based Adversarial Attacks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09105