In plain words: It sticks small textured patches on an image and uses trial-and-error learning that asks the model few questions to pick their spot and class-based texture. It fools ImageNet models over 99% of the time, touching 3% of the image, or 10% for targeted attacks.
Abstract · PatchAttack: A Black-box Texture-based Attack with Reinforcement Learning
Patch-based attacks introduce a perceptible but localized change to the input that induces misclassification. A limitation of current patch-based black-box attacks is that they perform poorly for targeted attacks, and even for the less challenging non-targeted scenarios, they require a large number of queries. Our proposed PatchAttack is query efficient and can break models for both targeted and non-targeted attacks. PatchAttack induces misclassifications by superimposing small textured patches on the input image. We parametrize the appearance of these patches by a dictionary of class-specific textures. This texture dictionary is learned by clustering Gram matrices of feature activations from a VGG backbone. PatchAttack optimizes the position and texture parameters of each patch using reinforcement learning. Our experiments show that PatchAttack achieves > 99% success rate on ImageNet for a wide range of architectures, while only manipulating 3% of the image for non-targeted attacks and 10% on average for targeted attacks. Furthermore, we show that PatchAttack circumvents state-of-the-art adversarial defense methods successfully.
Chenglin Yang, Adam Kortylewski, Cihang Xie, Yinzhi Cao, Alan Yuille
arXiv:2004.05682 · cs.CV · submitted Apr 12, 2020 · updated Jul 19, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · To appear in ECCV 2020
Does this not illustrate what is the fatal flaw in image recognition based approaches with neural networks, that their failure modes are inscrutable?
80% or 95% of the time they do well but the corner cases where they do poorly they fail in ways that are entirely unlike the was our brains' systems fail. Unpredictably. So they can be useful for non critical applications but not critical applications. Like self driving cars....
Stages of grief here... I was looking forward to my car with a cocktail cabinet that would drive me to parties and home again... I believed the hype five years ago. Is this why progress has stalled?