Combating Adversarial Attacks Using Sparse Representations

Soorya Gopalakrishnan; Zhinus Marzi; Upamanyu Madhow; Ramtin Pedarsani

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arXiv · 1803.03880

Combating Adversarial Attacks Using Sparse Representations

Soorya Gopalakrishnan·Zhinus Marzi·Upamanyu Madhow·Ramtin Pedarsani

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Abstract

It is by now well-known that small adversarial perturbations can induce classification errors in deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we make the case that sparse representations of the input data are a crucial tool for combating such attacks. For linear classifiers, we show that a sparsifying front end is provably effective against $\ell_{\infty}$-bounded attacks, reducing output distortion due to the attack by a factor of roughly $K / N$ where $N$ is the data dimension and $K$ is the sparsity level. We then extend this concept to DNNs, showing that a "locally linear" model can be used to develop a theoretical foundation for crafting attacks and defenses. Experimental results for the MNIST dataset show the efficacy of the proposed sparsifying front end.

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BibTeX RIS

Soorya Gopalakrishnan, Zhinus Marzi, Upamanyu Madhow, Ramtin Pedarsani. 2018-03-11. Combating Adversarial Attacks Using Sparse Representations. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03880

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