Robust Deep Learning Models Against Semantic-Preserving Adversarial Attack

Deep learning models can be fooled by small $l_p$-norm adversarial perturbations and natural perturbations in terms of attributes. Although the robustness against each perturbation has been explored, it remains a challenge to address the robustness against joint perturbations effectively. In this paper, we study the robustness of deep learning models against joint perturbations by proposing a novel attack mechanism named Semantic-Preserving Adversarial (SPA) attack, which can then be used to enhance adversarial training. Specifically, we introduce an attribute manipulator to generate natural and human-comprehensible perturbations and a noise generator to generate diverse adversarial noises. Based on such combined noises, we optimize both the attribute value and the diversity variable to generate jointly-perturbed samples. For robust training, we adversarially train the deep learning model against the generated joint perturbations. Empirical results on four benchmarks show that the SPA attack causes a larger performance decline with small $l_{\infty}$ norm-ball constraints compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, our SPA-enhanced training outperforms existing defense methods against such joint perturbations.