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Main Authors: Sutton, Oliver J., Zhou, Qinghua, Tyukin, Ivan Y., Gorban, Alexander N., Bastounis, Alexander, Higham, Desmond J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03665
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author Sutton, Oliver J.
Zhou, Qinghua
Tyukin, Ivan Y.
Gorban, Alexander N.
Bastounis, Alexander
Higham, Desmond J.
author_facet Sutton, Oliver J.
Zhou, Qinghua
Tyukin, Ivan Y.
Gorban, Alexander N.
Bastounis, Alexander
Higham, Desmond J.
contents Adversarial attacks dramatically change the output of an otherwise accurate learning system using a seemingly inconsequential modification to a piece of input data. Paradoxically, empirical evidence indicates that even systems which are robust to large random perturbations of the input data remain susceptible to small, easily constructed, adversarial perturbations of their inputs. Here, we show that this may be seen as a fundamental feature of classifiers working with high dimensional input data. We introduce a simple generic and generalisable framework for which key behaviours observed in practical systems arise with high probability -- notably the simultaneous susceptibility of the (otherwise accurate) model to easily constructed adversarial attacks, and robustness to random perturbations of the input data. We confirm that the same phenomena are directly observed in practical neural networks trained on standard image classification problems, where even large additive random noise fails to trigger the adversarial instability of the network. A surprising takeaway is that even small margins separating a classifier's decision surface from training and testing data can hide adversarial susceptibility from being detected using randomly sampled perturbations. Counterintuitively, using additive noise during training or testing is therefore inefficient for eradicating or detecting adversarial examples, and more demanding adversarial training is required.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_03665
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How adversarial attacks can disrupt seemingly stable accurate classifiers
Sutton, Oliver J.
Zhou, Qinghua
Tyukin, Ivan Y.
Gorban, Alexander N.
Bastounis, Alexander
Higham, Desmond J.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Adversarial attacks dramatically change the output of an otherwise accurate learning system using a seemingly inconsequential modification to a piece of input data. Paradoxically, empirical evidence indicates that even systems which are robust to large random perturbations of the input data remain susceptible to small, easily constructed, adversarial perturbations of their inputs. Here, we show that this may be seen as a fundamental feature of classifiers working with high dimensional input data. We introduce a simple generic and generalisable framework for which key behaviours observed in practical systems arise with high probability -- notably the simultaneous susceptibility of the (otherwise accurate) model to easily constructed adversarial attacks, and robustness to random perturbations of the input data. We confirm that the same phenomena are directly observed in practical neural networks trained on standard image classification problems, where even large additive random noise fails to trigger the adversarial instability of the network. A surprising takeaway is that even small margins separating a classifier's decision surface from training and testing data can hide adversarial susceptibility from being detected using randomly sampled perturbations. Counterintuitively, using additive noise during training or testing is therefore inefficient for eradicating or detecting adversarial examples, and more demanding adversarial training is required.
title How adversarial attacks can disrupt seemingly stable accurate classifiers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03665