Wang Fu

Yanghao Zhang, Fu Wang, Wenjie Ruan

Although there are a great number of adversarial attacks on deep learning based classifiers, how to attack object detection systems has been rarely studied. In this paper, we propose a Half-Neighbor Masked Projected Gradient Descent (HNM-PGD) based attack, which can generate strong perturbation to fool different kinds of detectors under strict constraints. We also applied the proposed HNM-PGD attack in the CIKM 2020 AnalytiCup Competition, which was ranked within the top 1% on the leaderboard. We release the code at https://github.com/YanghaoZYH/HNM-PGD.

Fu Wang, Yanghao Zhang, Xiangyu Yin et al.

Camera-based Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception models receive increasing attention for their crucial role in autonomous driving, a domain where concerns about the robustness and reliability of deep learning have been raised. While only a few works have investigated the effects of randomly generated semantic perturbations, aka natural corruptions, on the multi-view BEV detection task, we develop a black-box robustness evaluation framework that adversarially optimises three common semantic perturbations: geometric transformation, colour shifting, and motion blur, to deceive BEV models, serving as the first approach in this emerging field. To address the challenge posed by optimising the semantic perturbation, we design a smoothed, distance-based surrogate function to replace the mAP metric and introduce SimpleDIRECT, a deterministic optimisation algorithm that utilises observed slopes to guide the optimisation process. By comparing with randomised perturbation and two optimisation baselines, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Additionally, we provide a benchmark on the semantic robustness of ten recent BEV models. The results reveal that PolarFormer, which emphasises geometric information from multi-view images, exhibits the highest robustness, whereas BEVDet is fully compromised, with its precision reduced to zero.

Fu Wang, Yanghao Zhang, Yanbin Zheng et al.

Adversarial training is an effective but time-consuming way to train robust deep neural networks that can withstand strong adversarial attacks. As a response to its inefficiency, we propose Dynamic Efficient Adversarial Training (DEAT), which gradually increases the adversarial iteration during training. We demonstrate that the gradient's magnitude correlates with the curvature of the trained model's loss landscape, allowing it to reflect the effect of adversarial training. Therefore, based on the magnitude of the gradient, we propose a general acceleration strategy, M+ acceleration, which enables an automatic and highly effective method of adjusting the training procedure. M+ acceleration is computationally efficient and easy to implement. It is suited for DEAT and compatible with the majority of existing adversarial training techniques. Extensive experiments have been done on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets with various training environments. The results show that the proposed M+ acceleration significantly improves the training efficiency of existing adversarial training methods while achieving similar robustness performance. This demonstrates that the strategy is highly adaptive and offers a valuable solution for automatic adversarial training.