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Main Authors: Zhang, Lijun, Liu, Xiao, Mahmood, Kaleel, Ding, Caiwen, Guan, Hui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12066
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author Zhang, Lijun
Liu, Xiao
Mahmood, Kaleel
Ding, Caiwen
Guan, Hui
author_facet Zhang, Lijun
Liu, Xiao
Mahmood, Kaleel
Ding, Caiwen
Guan, Hui
contents Visual content understanding frequently relies on multi-task models to extract robust representations of a single visual input for multiple downstream tasks. However, in comparison to extensively studied single-task models, the adversarial robustness of multi-task models has received significantly less attention and many questions remain unclear: 1) How robust are multi-task models to single task adversarial attacks, 2) Can adversarial attacks be designed to simultaneously attack all tasks in a multi-task model, and 3) How does parameter sharing across tasks affect multi-task model robustness to adversarial attacks? This paper aims to answer these questions through careful analysis and rigorous experimentation. First, we analyze the inherent drawbacks of two commonly-used adaptations of single-task white-box attacks in attacking multi-task models. We then propose a novel attack framework, Dynamic Gradient Balancing Attack (DGBA). Our framework poses the problem of attacking all tasks in a multi-task model as an optimization problem that can be efficiently solved through integer linear programming. Extensive evaluation on two popular MTL benchmarks, NYUv2 and Tiny-Taxonomy, demonstrates the effectiveness of DGBA compared to baselines in attacking both clean and adversarially trained multi-task models. Our results also reveal a fundamental trade-off between improving task accuracy via parameter sharing across tasks and undermining model robustness due to increased attack transferability from parameter sharing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_12066
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Attacking All Tasks at Once Using Adversarial Examples in Multi-Task Learning
Zhang, Lijun
Liu, Xiao
Mahmood, Kaleel
Ding, Caiwen
Guan, Hui
Machine Learning
Visual content understanding frequently relies on multi-task models to extract robust representations of a single visual input for multiple downstream tasks. However, in comparison to extensively studied single-task models, the adversarial robustness of multi-task models has received significantly less attention and many questions remain unclear: 1) How robust are multi-task models to single task adversarial attacks, 2) Can adversarial attacks be designed to simultaneously attack all tasks in a multi-task model, and 3) How does parameter sharing across tasks affect multi-task model robustness to adversarial attacks? This paper aims to answer these questions through careful analysis and rigorous experimentation. First, we analyze the inherent drawbacks of two commonly-used adaptations of single-task white-box attacks in attacking multi-task models. We then propose a novel attack framework, Dynamic Gradient Balancing Attack (DGBA). Our framework poses the problem of attacking all tasks in a multi-task model as an optimization problem that can be efficiently solved through integer linear programming. Extensive evaluation on two popular MTL benchmarks, NYUv2 and Tiny-Taxonomy, demonstrates the effectiveness of DGBA compared to baselines in attacking both clean and adversarially trained multi-task models. Our results also reveal a fundamental trade-off between improving task accuracy via parameter sharing across tasks and undermining model robustness due to increased attack transferability from parameter sharing.
title Attacking All Tasks at Once Using Adversarial Examples in Multi-Task Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12066