Attacking Binarized Neural Networks

Angus Galloway, Graham W. Taylor, Medhat Moussa

Abstract:

Neural networks with low-precision weights and activations offer compelling
efficiency advantages over their full-precision equivalents. The two most
frequently discussed benefits of quantization are reduced memory consumption,
and a faster forward pass when implemented with efficient bitwise
operations. We propose a third benefit of very low-precision neural networks:
improved robustness against some adversarial attacks, and in the worst case,
performance that is on par with full-precision models. We focus on the very
low-precision case where weights and activations are both quantized to $\pm$1,
and note that stochastically quantizing weights in just one layer can sharply
reduce the impact of iterative attacks. We observe that non-scaled binary neural
networks exhibit a similar effect to the original \emph{defensive distillation}
procedure that led to \emph{gradient masking}, and a false notion of security.
We address this by conducting both black-box and white-box experiments with
binary models that do not artificially mask gradients.

TL;DR: We conduct adversarial attacks against binarized neural networks and show that we reduce the impact of the strongest attacks, while maintaining comparable accuracy in a black-box setting

Keywords: adversarial examples, adversarial attacks, binary, binarized neural networks

Code: [ AngusG/cleverhans-attacking-bnns](https://github.com/AngusG/cleverhans-attacking-bnns)

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

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/attacking-binarized-neural-networks/code)