There are No Bit Parts for Sign Bits in Black-Box Attacks
share
Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In this paper, we are concerned with black-box adversarial attacks, where only loss-oracle access to a model is available. At the heart of black-box adversarial attack is the gradient estimation problem with query complexity O(n), where n is the number of data features. Recent work has developed query-efficient gradient estimation schemes by exploiting data- and/or time-dependent priors. Practically, sign-based optimization has shown to be effective in both training deep nets as well as attacking them in a white-box setting. Therefore, instead of a gradient estimation view of black-box adversarial attacks, we view the black-box adversarial attack problem as estimating the gradient's sign bits. This shifts the view from continuous to binary black-box optimization and theoretically guarantees a lower query complexity of Ω(n/ _2(n+1)) when given access to a Hamming loss oracle. We present three algorithms to estimate the gradient sign bits given a limited number of queries to the loss oracle. Using one of our proposed algorithms to craft black-box adversarial examples, we demonstrate evasion rate experiments on standard models trained on the MNIST, CIFAR10, and IMAGENET datasets that set new state-of-the-art results for query-efficient black-box attacks. Averaged over all the datasets and metrics, our attack fails 3.8× less often and spends in total 2.5× fewer queries than the current state-of-the-art attacks combined given a budget of 10,000 queries per attack attempt. On a public MNIST black-box attack challenge, our attack achieves the highest evasion rate surpassing all of the submitted attacks. Notably, our attack is hyperparameter-free (no hyperparameter tuning) and does not employ any data-/time-dependent prior, the latter fact suggesting that the number of queries can further be reduced.
READ FULL TEXT