Constrained Gradient Descent: A Powerful and Principled Evasion Attack Against Neural Networks

Weiran Lin*, Keane Lucas*, Lujo Bauer*, Michael K. Reiter*, Mahmood Sharif*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

We propose new, more efficient targeted white-box attacks against deep neural networks. Our attacks better align with the attacker's goal: (1) tricking a model to assign higher probability to the target class than to any other class, while (2) staying within an ε-distance of the attacked input. First, we demonstrate a loss function that explicitly encodes (1) and show that Auto-PGD finds more attacks with it. Second, we propose a new attack method, Constrained Gradient Descent (CGD), using a refinement of our loss function that captures both (1) and (2). CGD seeks to satisfy both attacker objectives-misclassification and bounded ℓp-norm-in a principled manner, as part of the optimization, instead of via ad hoc post-processing techniques (e.g., projection or clipping). We show that CGD is more successful on CIFAR10 (0.9-4.2%) and ImageNet (8.6-13.6%) than state-of-the-art attacks while consuming less time (11.4-18.8%). Statistical tests confirm that our attack outperforms others against leading defenses on different datasets and values of ε.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)13405-13430
Number of pages26
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume162
StatePublished - 2022
Event39th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2022 - Baltimore, United States
Duration: 17 Jul 202223 Jul 2022

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