Scaling Laws for Black box Adversarial Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Chuan, Chen, Huanran, Zhang, Yichi, Zhu, Jun, Dong, Yinpeng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Liu, Chuan
Chen, Huanran
Zhang, Yichi
Zhu, Jun
Dong, Yinpeng
author_facet Liu, Chuan
Chen, Huanran
Zhang, Yichi
Zhu, Jun
Dong, Yinpeng
contents Adversarial examples exhibit cross-model transferability, enabling threatening black-box attacks on commercial models. Model ensembling, which attacks multiple surrogate models, is a known strategy to improve this transferability. However, prior studies typically use small, fixed ensembles, which leaves open an intriguing question of whether scaling the number of surrogate models can further improve black-box attacks. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of this question. We show that by resolving gradient conflict with advanced optimizers, we discover a robust and universal log-linear scaling law through both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) scales linearly with the logarithm of the ensemble size $T$. We rigorously verify this law across standard classifiers, SOTA defenses, and MLLMs, and find that scaling distills robust, semantic features of the target class. Consequently, we apply this fundamental insight to benchmark SOTA MLLMs. This reveals both the attack's devastating power and a clear robustness hierarchy: we achieve 80\%+ transfer attack success rate on proprietary models like GPT-4o, while also highlighting the exceptional resilience of Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Our findings urge a shift in focus for robustness evaluation: from designing intricate algorithms on small ensembles to understanding the principled and powerful threat of scaling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_16782
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Laws for Black box Adversarial Attacks
Liu, Chuan
Chen, Huanran
Zhang, Yichi
Zhu, Jun
Dong, Yinpeng
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Adversarial examples exhibit cross-model transferability, enabling threatening black-box attacks on commercial models. Model ensembling, which attacks multiple surrogate models, is a known strategy to improve this transferability. However, prior studies typically use small, fixed ensembles, which leaves open an intriguing question of whether scaling the number of surrogate models can further improve black-box attacks. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of this question. We show that by resolving gradient conflict with advanced optimizers, we discover a robust and universal log-linear scaling law through both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) scales linearly with the logarithm of the ensemble size $T$. We rigorously verify this law across standard classifiers, SOTA defenses, and MLLMs, and find that scaling distills robust, semantic features of the target class. Consequently, we apply this fundamental insight to benchmark SOTA MLLMs. This reveals both the attack's devastating power and a clear robustness hierarchy: we achieve 80\%+ transfer attack success rate on proprietary models like GPT-4o, while also highlighting the exceptional resilience of Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Our findings urge a shift in focus for robustness evaluation: from designing intricate algorithms on small ensembles to understanding the principled and powerful threat of scaling.
title Scaling Laws for Black box Adversarial Attacks
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16782