Towards Reverse-Engineering Black-Box Neural NetworksDownload PDF

15 Feb 2018 (modified: 22 Oct 2023)ICLR 2018 Conference Blind SubmissionReaders: Everyone
Abstract: Many deployed learned models are black boxes: given input, returns output. Internal information about the model, such as the architecture, optimisation procedure, or training data, is not disclosed explicitly as it might contain proprietary information or make the system more vulnerable. This work shows that such attributes of neural networks can be exposed from a sequence of queries. This has multiple implications. On the one hand, our work exposes the vulnerability of black-box neural networks to different types of attacks -- we show that the revealed internal information helps generate more effective adversarial examples against the black box model. On the other hand, this technique can be used for better protection of private content from automatic recognition models using adversarial examples. Our paper suggests that it is actually hard to draw a line between white box and black box models.
TL;DR: Querying a black-box neural network reveals a lot of information about it; we propose novel "metamodels" for effectively extracting information from a black box.
Keywords: black box, security, privacy, attack, metamodel, adversarial example, reverse-engineering, machine learning
Code: [![Papers with Code](/images/pwc_icon.svg) 2 community implementations](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=BydjJte0-)
Data: [MNIST](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/mnist)
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1711.01768/code)
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