Combating Adversaries with Anti-Adversaries

Abstract

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to small input perturbations known as adversarial attacks. Inspired by the fact that these adversaries are constructed by iteratively minimizing the confidence of a network for the true class label, we propose the anti-adversary layer, aimed at countering this effect. In particular, our layer generates an input perturbation in the opposite direction of the adversarial one, and feeds the classifier a perturbed version of the input. Our approach is training-free and theoretically supported. We verify the effectiveness of our approach by combining our layer with both nominally and robustly trained models, and conduct large scale experiments from black-box to adaptive attacks on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Our anti-adversary layer significantly enhances model robustness while coming at no cost on clean accuracy.

Publication
In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Motasem Alfarra
Motasem Alfarra
Machine Learning Researcher at Qualcomm AI Research, Amsterdam, Netherlands

I am a machine learning researcher at Qualcomm AI Research in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from KAUST in Saudi Arabia advised by Prof. Bernard Ghanem. I also obtained my M.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering from KAUST, and my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Kuwait University. I am interested in domain shifts, LLM safety, and how to combat them with test-time adaptation and continual learning. I helped co-organizing the first workshop on Test-Time Adaptation at CVPR2024!