Adversarial Attacks on Probabilistic Autoregressive Forecasting Models
This work addresses vulnerabilities in probabilistic forecasting models used in critical domains like finance and energy, but it is incremental as it extends prior adversarial attack methods to a specific model type.
The paper tackles the problem of generating adversarial attacks on probabilistic autoregressive forecasting models, which output sequences of probability distributions, by addressing the challenge of differentiating through Monte-Carlo estimation. It demonstrates successful attacks with small input perturbations in stock market trading and electricity consumption prediction tasks.
We develop an effective generation of adversarial attacks on neural models that output a sequence of probability distributions rather than a sequence of single values. This setting includes the recently proposed deep probabilistic autoregressive forecasting models that estimate the probability distribution of a time series given its past and achieve state-of-the-art results in a diverse set of application domains. The key technical challenge we address is effectively differentiating through the Monte-Carlo estimation of statistics of the joint distribution of the output sequence. Additionally, we extend prior work on probabilistic forecasting to the Bayesian setting which allows conditioning on future observations, instead of only on past observations. We demonstrate that our approach can successfully generate attacks with small input perturbations in two challenging tasks where robust decision making is crucial: stock market trading and prediction of electricity consumption.