Provably Robust Adversarial Examples

Dimitar Iliev Dimitrov, Gagandeep Singh, Timon Gehr, Martin Vechev

Keywords: Adversarial attacks, Robustness Certification, Abstract Interpretation, Deep Learning

Abstract: We introduce the concept of provably robust adversarial examples for deep neural networks – connected input regions constructed from standard adversarial examples which are guaranteed to be robust to a set of real-world perturbations (such as changes in pixel intensity and geometric transformations). We present a novel method called PARADE for generating these regions in a scalable manner which works by iteratively refining the region initially obtained via sampling until a refined region is certified to be adversarial with existing state-of-the-art verifiers. At each step, a novel optimization procedure is applied to maximize the region's volume under the constraint that the convex relaxation of the network behavior with respect to the region implies a chosen bound on the certification objective. Our experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of PARADE: it successfully finds large provably robust regions including ones containing $\approx 10^{573}$ adversarial examples for pixel intensity and $\approx 10^{599}$ for geometric perturbations. The provability enables our robust examples to be significantly more effective against state-of-the-art defenses based on randomized smoothing than the individual attacks used to construct the regions.

One-sentence Summary: We introduce the concept of provably robust adversarial examples $-$ connected input regions constructed from standard adversarial examples and guaranteed to be provably robust to a set of perturbations.