English

QuSecNets: Quantization-based Defense Mechanism for Securing Deep Neural Network against Adversarial Attacks

Machine Learning 2020-05-15 v2 Cryptography and Security Machine Learning

Abstract

Adversarial examples have emerged as a significant threat to machine learning algorithms, especially to the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we propose two quantization-based defense mechanisms, Constant Quantization (CQ) and Trainable Quantization (TQ), to increase the robustness of CNNs against adversarial examples. CQ quantizes input pixel intensities based on a "fixed" number of quantization levels, while in TQ, the quantization levels are "iteratively learned during the training phase", thereby providing a stronger defense mechanism. We apply the proposed techniques on undefended CNNs against different state-of-the-art adversarial attacks from the open-source \textit{Cleverhans} library. The experimental results demonstrate 50%-96% and 10%-50% increase in the classification accuracy of the perturbed images generated from the MNIST and the CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, on commonly used CNN (Conv2D(64, 8x8) - Conv2D(128, 6x6) - Conv2D(128, 5x5) - Dense(10) - Softmax()) available in \textit{Cleverhans} library.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.01437,
  title  = {QuSecNets: Quantization-based Defense Mechanism for Securing Deep Neural Network against Adversarial Attacks},
  author = {Faiq Khalid and Hassan Ali and Hammad Tariq and Muhammad Abdullah Hanif and Semeen Rehman and Rehan Ahmed and Muhammad Shafique},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.01437},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:03:39.255Z