ACE: Artificial Checkerboard Enhancer to Induce and Evade Adversarial Attacks

Jisung Hwang, Younghoon Kim, Sanghyuk Chun, Jaejun Yoo, Ji-Hoon Kim, Dongyoon Han, Jung-Woo Ha

Abstract: The checkerboard phenomenon is one of the well-known visual artifacts in the computer vision field. The origins and solutions of checkerboard artifacts in the pixel space have been studied for a long time, but their effects on the gradient space have rarely been investigated. In this paper, we revisit the checkerboard artifacts in the gradient space which turn out to be the weak point of a network architecture. We explore image-agnostic property of gradient checkerboard artifacts and propose a simple yet effective defense method by utilizing the artifacts. We introduce our defense module, dubbed Artificial Checkerboard Enhancer (ACE), which induces adversarial attacks on designated pixels. This enables the model to deflect attacks by shifting only a single pixel in the image with a remarkable defense rate. We provide extensive experiments to support the effectiveness of our work for various attack scenarios using state-of-the-art attack methods. Furthermore, we show that ACE is even applicable to large-scale datasets including ImageNet dataset and can be easily transferred to various pretrained networks.

Keywords: Adversarial Examples, Neural Network Security, Deep Neural Network, Checkerboard Artifact

TL;DR: We propose a novel aritificial checkerboard enhancer (ACE) module which guides attacks to a pre-specified pixel space and successfully defends it with a simple padding operation.

Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10), [ImageNet](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/imagenet)