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Poster
On Adaptive Attacks to Adversarial Example Defenses
Florian Tramer · Nicholas Carlini · Wieland Brendel · Aleksander Madry

Wed Dec 09 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Poster Session 3 #921
in Poster Session 4 »

Adaptive attacks have (rightfully) become the de facto standard for evaluating defenses to adversarial examples. We find, however, that typical adaptive evaluations are incomplete. We demonstrate that 13 defenses recently published at ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS---and which illustrate a diverse set of defense strategies---can be circumvented despite attempting to perform evaluations using adaptive attacks.

While prior evaluation papers focused mainly on the end result---showing that a defense was ineffective---this paper focuses on laying out the methodology and the approach necessary to perform an adaptive attack. Some of our attack strategies are generalizable, but no single strategy would have been sufficient for all defenses. This underlines our key message that adaptive attacks cannot be automated and always require careful and appropriate tuning to a given defense. We hope that these analyses will serve as guidance on how to properly perform adaptive attacks against defenses to adversarial examples, and thus will allow the community to make further progress in building more robust models.

[ Paper ]

Author Information

Florian Tramer (Stanford University)
Nicholas Carlini (Google)
Wieland Brendel (University of Tübingen)
Aleksander Madry (MIT)

Aleksander Madry is the NBX Associate Professor of Computer Science in the MIT EECS Department and a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from MIT in 2011 and, prior to joining the MIT faculty, he spent some time at Microsoft Research New England and on the faculty of EPFL. Aleksander's research interests span algorithms, continuous optimization, science of deep learning and understanding machine learning from a robustness perspective. His work has been recognized with a number of awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, and 2018 Presburger Award.

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