Efficient Sparse Attacks on Videos using Reinforcement Learning

Huanqian Yan, Xingxing Wei

Abstract: More and more deep neural network models have been deployed in real-time video systems. However, it is proved that deep models are susceptible to the crafted adversarial examples. The adversarial examples are imperceptible and can make the normal deep models misclassify them. Although there exist a few works aiming at the adversarial examples of video recognition in the black-box attack mode, most of them need large perturbations or hundreds of thousands of queries. There are still lack of effective adversarial methods to produce adversarial videos with small perturbations and limited query numbers at the same time. In this paper, an efficient and powerful method is proposed for adversarial video attacks in the black-box attack mode. The proposed method is based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) like the previous work, i.e. using the agent in RL to adaptively find the sparse key frames to add perturbations. The key difference is that we design the new reward functions based on the loss reduction and the perturbation increment, and thus propose an efficient update mechanism to guide the agent to finish the attacks with smaller perturbations and fewer query numbers. The proposed algorithm has a new working mechanism. It is simple, efficient, and effective. Extensive experiments show our method has a good trade-off between the perturbation amplitude and the query numbers. Compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, it has reduced 65.75% query numbers without image quality loss in the un-targeted attacks and simultaneously reduced 22.47% perturbations and 54.77% query numbers in the targeted attacks.