Adversarial Detector for Decision Tree Ensembles Using Representation Learning

Gal Braun, Lior Rokach

Keywords: Machine Learning, Representation Learning, Adversarial Learning, Evasion Attacks, Adversarial Detection, Tree Ensembles, Decision Trees

Abstract:

Research on adversarial evasion attacks focuses mainly on neural network models. Among other reasons, this is because of their popularity in certain fields (e.g., computer vision and NLP) and the models' properties, making it easier to search for adversarial examples with minimal input change. Decision trees and tree ensembles are still very popular due to their high
performance in fields dominated by tabular data and their explainability. In recent years, several works have defined new adversarial attacks targeting decision trees and tree ensembles. As a result, several papers were published focusing on robust versions of tree ensembles. This research aims to create an adversarial detector for attacks on an ensemble of decision trees. While several previous works have demonstrated the generation of more robust tree ensembles, the process of considering evasion attacks during ensemble generation can affect model performance. We demonstrate a method to detect adversarial samples without affecting either the target model structure or its original performance. We showed that by using representation learning based on the structure of the trees, we achieved better detection rates than the state-of-the-art technique and better than using the original representation of the dataset to train an adversarial detector.

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