Generating Adversarial Examples with Task Oriented Multi-Objective Optimization

Anh Tuan Bui, Trung Le, He Zhao, Quan Hung Tran, Paul Montague, Dinh Phung

Abstract:

Deep learning models, even the-state-of-the-art ones, are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial training is one of the most efficient methods to improve the model's robustness. The key factor for the success of adversarial training is the capability to generate
qualified and divergent adversarial examples which satisfy some objectives/goals (e.g., finding adversarial examples that maximize the model losses for simultaneously attacking multiple models). Therefore, multi-objective optimization (MOO) is a natural tool for adversarial example generation to achieve multiple objectives/goals simultaneously. However, we observe that a naive application of MOO tends to maximize all objectives/goals equally, without caring if an objective/goal has been achieved yet. This leads to useless effort to further improve the goal-achieved tasks, while putting less focus on the goal-unachieved tasks. In this paper, we propose \emph{Task Oriented MOO} to address this issue, in the context where we can explicitly define the goal achievement for a task. Our principle is to only maintain the goal-achieved tasks, while letting the optimizer spend more effort on improving the goal-unachieved tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments for our Task Oriented MOO on various adversarial example generation schemes. The experimental results firmly demonstrate the merit of our proposed approach.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Code: https://github.com/tuananhbui89/TAMOO

Assigned Action Editor: ~Zhe_Gan1

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Submission Number: 1027