Alex Wong

Dong Lao, Yuxiang Zhang, Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie et al.

We propose a test-time defense mechanism against adversarial attacks: imperceptible image perturbations that significantly alter the predictions of a model. Unlike existing methods that rely on feature filtering or smoothing, which can lead to information loss, we propose to "combat noise with noise" by leveraging stochastic resonance to enhance robustness while minimizing information loss. Our approach introduces small translational perturbations to the input image, aligns the transformed feature embeddings, and aggregates them before mapping back to the original reference image. This can be expressed in a closed-form formula, which can be deployed on diverse existing network architectures without introducing additional network modules or fine-tuning for specific attack types. The resulting method is entirely training-free, architecture-agnostic, and attack-agnostic. Empirical results show state-of-the-art robustness on image classification and, for the first time, establish a generic test-time defense for dense prediction tasks, including stereo matching and optical flow, highlighting the method's versatility and practicality. Specifically, relative to clean (unperturbed) performance, our method recovers up to 68.1% of the accuracy loss on image classification, 71.9% on stereo matching, and 29.2% on optical flow under various types of adversarial attacks.

Zachary Berger, Parth Agrawal, Tian Yu Liu et al.

We study the effect of adversarial perturbations of images on deep stereo matching networks for the disparity estimation task. We present a method to craft a single set of perturbations that, when added to any stereo image pair in a dataset, can fool a stereo network to significantly alter the perceived scene geometry. Our perturbation images are "universal" in that they not only corrupt estimates of the network on the dataset they are optimized for, but also generalize to different architectures trained on different datasets. We evaluate our approach on multiple benchmark datasets where our perturbations can increase the D1-error (akin to fooling rate) of state-of-the-art stereo networks from 1% to as much as 87%. We investigate the effect of perturbations on the estimated scene geometry and identify object classes that are most vulnerable. Our analysis on the activations of registered points between left and right images led us to find architectural components that can increase robustness against adversaries. By simply designing networks with such components, one can reduce the effect of adversaries by up to 60.5%, which rivals the robustness of networks fine-tuned with costly adversarial data augmentation. Our design principle also improves their robustness against common image corruptions by an average of 70%.