Prior convictions: Black-box adversarial attacks with bandits and priors

We study the problem of generating adversarial examples in a black-box setting in which only loss-oracle access to a model is available. We introduce a framework that conceptually unifies much of the existing work on black-box attacks, and we demonstrate that the current state-of-the-art methods are...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ilyas, Andrew., Engstrom, Logan G., Madry, Aleksander
Other Authors: MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: arXiv 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129721
Description
Summary:We study the problem of generating adversarial examples in a black-box setting in which only loss-oracle access to a model is available. We introduce a framework that conceptually unifies much of the existing work on black-box attacks, and we demonstrate that the current state-of-the-art methods are optimal in a natural sense. Despite this optimality, we show how to improve black-box attacks by bringing a new element into the problem: gradient priors. We give a bandit optimization-based algorithm that allows us to seamlessly integrate any such priors, and we explicitly identify and incorporate two examples. The resulting methods use two to four times fewer queries and fail two to five times less than the current state-of-the-art.