English

One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure: Resisting Adversarial Examples by Adversarial Examples

Machine Learning 2019-12-02 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Image and Video Processing Machine Learning

Abstract

Modern image classification systems are often built on deep neural networks, which suffer from adversarial examples--images with deliberately crafted, imperceptible noise to mislead the network's classification. To defend against adversarial examples, a plausible idea is to obfuscate the network's gradient with respect to the input image. This general idea has inspired a long line of defense methods. Yet, almost all of them have proven vulnerable. We revisit this seemingly flawed idea from a radically different perspective. We embrace the omnipresence of adversarial examples and the numerical procedure of crafting them, and turn this harmful attacking process into a useful defense mechanism. Our defense method is conceptually simple: before feeding an input image for classification, transform it by finding an adversarial example on a pre-trained external model. We evaluate our method against a wide range of possible attacks. On both CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet datasets, our method is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, in comparison to adversarial training, our method offers lower training cost as well as stronger robustness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.11219,
  title  = {One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure: Resisting Adversarial Examples by Adversarial Examples},
  author = {Chang Xiao and Changxi Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11219},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:26:59.818Z