On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness

Nicholas Carlini; Anish Athalye; Nicolas Papernot; Wieland Brendel; Jonas Rauber; Dimitris Tsipras; Ian Goodfellow; Aleksander Madry; Alexey Kurakin

arXiv · 1902.06705

On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness

Nicholas Carlini·Anish Athalye·Nicolas Papernot·Wieland Brendel·Jonas Rauber·Dimitris Tsipras·Ian Goodfellow·Aleksander Madry·Alexey Kurakin

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Abstract

Correctly evaluating defenses against adversarial examples has proven to be extremely difficult. Despite the significant amount of recent work attempting to design defenses that withstand adaptive attacks, few have succeeded; most papers that propose defenses are quickly shown to be incorrect. We believe a large contributing factor is the difficulty of performing security evaluations. In this paper, we discuss the methodological foundations, review commonly accepted best practices, and suggest new methods for evaluating defenses to adversarial examples. We hope that both researchers developing defenses as well as readers and reviewers who wish to understand the completeness of an evaluation consider our advice in order to avoid common pitfalls.

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Nicholas Carlini, Anish Athalye, Nicolas Papernot, Wieland Brendel, Jonas Rauber, Dimitris Tsipras, Ian Goodfellow, Aleksander Madry, Alexey Kurakin. 2019-02-18. On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.06705

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