Adversarial Attacks Beyond the Image Space
This addresses security concerns for deep neural networks in real-world applications like object classification and visual question answering by demonstrating vulnerabilities to physical-world manipulations.
The paper tackles the problem of generating adversarial examples by focusing on meaningful 3D physical perturbations like rotation and illumination, rather than per-pixel changes in images, and finds that such attacks are possible but more difficult, with lower success rates and heavier perturbations required.
Generating adversarial examples is an intriguing problem and an important way of understanding the working mechanism of deep neural networks. Most existing approaches generated perturbations in the image space, i.e., each pixel can be modified independently. However, in this paper we pay special attention to the subset of adversarial examples that correspond to meaningful changes in 3D physical properties (like rotation and translation, illumination condition, etc.). These adversaries arguably pose a more serious concern, as they demonstrate the possibility of causing neural network failure by easy perturbations of real-world 3D objects and scenes. In the contexts of object classification and visual question answering, we augment state-of-the-art deep neural networks that receive 2D input images with a rendering module (either differentiable or not) in front, so that a 3D scene (in the physical space) is rendered into a 2D image (in the image space), and then mapped to a prediction (in the output space). The adversarial perturbations can now go beyond the image space, and have clear meanings in the 3D physical world. Though image-space adversaries can be interpreted as per-pixel albedo change, we verify that they cannot be well explained along these physically meaningful dimensions, which often have a non-local effect. But it is still possible to successfully attack beyond the image space on the physical space, though this is more difficult than image-space attacks, reflected in lower success rates and heavier perturbations required.