Adversarial Vulnerability of Neural Networks Increases With Input Dimension
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Over the past four years, neural networks have proven vulnerable to adversarial images: targeted but imperceptible image perturbations lead to drastically different predictions. We show that adversarial vulnerability increases with the gradients of the training objective when seen as a function of the inputs. For most current network architectures, we prove that the ℓ_1-norm of these gradients grows as the square root of the input-size. These nets therefore become increasingly vulnerable with growing image size. Over the course of our analysis we rediscover and generalize double-backpropagation, a technique that penalizes large gradients in the loss surface to reduce adversarial vulnerability and increase generalization performance. We show that this regularization-scheme is equivalent at first order to training with adversarial noise. Finally, we demonstrate that replacing strided by average-pooling layers decreases adversarial vulnerability. Our proofs rely on the network's weight-distribution at initialization, but extensive experiments confirm their conclusions after training.
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