English

Learning Black-Box Attackers with Transferable Priors and Query Feedback

Cryptography and Security 2020-10-23 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenging black-box adversarial attack problem, where only classification confidence of a victim model is available. Inspired by consistency of visual saliency between different vision models, a surrogate model is expected to improve the attack performance via transferability. By combining transferability-based and query-based black-box attack, we propose a surprisingly simple baseline approach (named SimBA++) using the surrogate model, which significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, to efficiently utilize the query feedback, we update the surrogate model in a novel learning scheme, named High-Order Gradient Approximation (HOGA). By constructing a high-order gradient computation graph, we update the surrogate model to approximate the victim model in both forward and backward pass. The SimBA++ and HOGA result in Learnable Black-Box Attack (LeBA), which surpasses previous state of the art by considerable margins: the proposed LeBA significantly reduces queries, while keeping higher attack success rates close to 100% in extensive ImageNet experiments, including attacking vision benchmarks and defensive models. Code is open source at https://github.com/TrustworthyDL/LeBA.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.11742,
  title  = {Learning Black-Box Attackers with Transferable Priors and Query Feedback},
  author = {Jiancheng Yang and Yangzhou Jiang and Xiaoyang Huang and Bingbing Ni and Chenglong Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.11742},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2020. Code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyDL/LeBA

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:33:28.844Z