Similar Locality Based Transfer Evolutionary Optimization for Minimalistic Attacks

Wenqiang Ma, Yaqing Hou, Hua Yu, Xiangrong Tong, Zexuan Zhu, Qiang Zhang

Abstract: Deep neural networks are powerful and popular learning models; however, recent studies have shown that deep neural network-based policies are susceptible to deception by adversarial attacks. A minimalistic attack is a specialized form of adversarial attack that aims to accomplish successful attacks at the lowest possible cost. Recently, transfer optimization algorithms have been applied to deceive previously trained policies by acquiring knowledge from previously solved tasks. Experiments indicate that the transfer optimization algorithms perform well compared to traditional optimization algorithms. However, current transfer algorithms for addressing minimalistic attacks not only select a single source task for knowledge transfer but also tend to overly rely on identified appropriate source tasks. To address this issue, this paper introduces a similar locality based transfer evolutionary optimization algorithm. It can adaptively select multiple source tasks and extract valuable knowledge from these source tasks. Moreover, by leveraging the concept of similar locality, the algorithm alleviates its excessive dependence on familiar tasks, thereby providing fresh knowledge for the optimization of the target task. On this basis, the algorithm can mine more valuable knowledge from the large source task space to achieve a successful attack in a shorter period. The algorithm is tested on three Atari games-BeamRider, Qbert, and Seaquest-demonstrating its ability and potential to outperform other transfer optimization algorithms currently available in solving this problem.