Are adversarial examples inevitable?

Ali Shafahi, W. Ronny Huang, Christoph Studer, Soheil Feizi, Tom Goldstein

Abstract:

A wide range of defenses have been proposed to harden neural networks against adversarial attacks. However, a pattern has emerged in which the majority of adversarial defenses are quickly broken by new attacks. Given the lack of success at generating robust defenses, we are led to ask a fundamental question: Are adversarial attacks inevitable?
This paper analyzes adversarial examples from a theoretical perspective, and identifies fundamental bounds on the susceptibility of a classifier to adversarial attacks. We show that, for certain classes of problems, adversarial examples are inescapable. Using experiments, we explore the implications of theoretical guarantees for real-world problems and discuss how factors such as dimensionality and image complexity limit a classifier's robustness against adversarial examples.

Keywords: adversarial examples, neural networks, security

TL;DR: This paper identifies classes of problems for which adversarial examples are inescapable, and derives fundamental bounds on the susceptibility of any classifier to adversarial examples.