In plain words: Instead of tweaking a real image, this builds one from scratch by searching a generator's code for pictures that look like a chosen class yet fool a classifier. Human raters judged them genuine, and they slipped past strong defenses built to block tiny tweaks.
Abstract · Constructing Unrestricted Adversarial Examples with Generative Models
Adversarial examples are typically constructed by perturbing an existing data point within a small matrix norm, and current defense methods are focused on guarding against this type of attack. In this paper, we propose unrestricted adversarial examples, a new threat model where the attackers are not restricted to small norm-bounded perturbations. Different from perturbation-based attacks, we propose to synthesize unrestricted adversarial examples entirely from scratch using conditional generative models. Specifically, we first train an Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (AC-GAN) to model the class-conditional distribution over data samples. Then, conditioned on a desired class, we search over the AC-GAN latent space to find images that are likely under the generative model and are misclassified by a target classifier. We demonstrate through human evaluation that unrestricted adversarial examples generated this way are legitimate and belong to the desired class. Our empirical results on the MNIST, SVHN, and CelebA datasets show that unrestricted adversarial examples can bypass strong adversarial training and certified defense methods designed for traditional adversarial attacks.
Yang Song, Rui Shu, Nate Kushman, Stefano Ermon
arXiv:1805.07894 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.CV, stat.ML · submitted May 21, 2018 · updated Dec 2, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018)
However, everyone who says "this shows deep learning models can't work," or draw a similar conclusion, is missing the point.
More training data and more stretching of existing data will increase robustness. Ideally, models will be measured on robustness against attack as well as precision and recall.