We attempt to interpret how adversarially trained convolutional neural networks (AT-CNNs) recognize objects. We design systematic approaches to interpret AT-CNNs in both qualitative and quantitative ways and compare them with normally trained models. Surprisingly, we find that adversarial training alleviates the texture bias of standard CNNs when trained on object recognition tasks, and helps CNNs learn a more shape-biased representation. We validate our hypothesis from two aspects. First, we compare the salience maps of AT-CNNs and standard CNNs on clean images and images under different transformations. The comparison could visually show that the prediction of the two types of CNNs is sensitive to dramatically different types of features. Second, to achieve quantitative verification, we construct additional test datasets that destroy either textures or shapes, such as style-transferred version of clean data, saturated images and patch-shuffled ones, and then evaluate the classification accuracy of AT-CNNs and normal CNNs on these datasets. Our findings shed some light on why AT-CNNs are more robust than those normally trained ones and contribute to a better understanding of adversarial training over CNNs from an interpretation perspective.
In this work, we mainly interpret the AT-CNNs based on norm-constrained perturbation over the original images. It is worthy of noting that the difference between normally trained and adversarially trained CNNs may highly depends on the type of adversaries. Models trained against spatially-transformed adversary @cite_39 , denoted as ST-ST-CNNs, have similar robustness towards PGD attack with standard models, and their salience maps are still quite different as shown in Figure . Also the average distance between salience maps is close to that of standard CNN, which is much higher than that of PGD-AT-CNN. There exists a variety of generalized types of attacks, @math parameterized by @math , such as spatially transformed @cite_39 and GAN-based adversarial examples @cite_3 . We leave interpreting the AT-CNNs based on these generalized types of attacks as future work.
@cite_3 @cite_39
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Adversarial examples are typically constructed by perturbing an existing data point within a small matrix norm, and current defense methods are focused on guarding against this type of attack. In this paper, we propose a new class of adversarial examples that are synthesized entirely from scratch using a conditional generative model, without being restricted to norm-bounded perturbations. We first train an Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (AC-GAN) to model the class-conditional distribution over data samples. Then, conditioned on a desired class, we search over the AC-GAN latent space to find images that are likely under the generative model and are misclassified by a target classifier. We demonstrate through human evaluation that these new kind of adversarial images, which we call Generative Adversarial Examples, are legitimate and belong to the desired class. Our empirical results on the MNIST, SVHN, and CelebA datasets show that generative adversarial examples can bypass strong adversarial training and certified defense methods designed for traditional adversarial attacks. Recent studies show that widely used Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to the carefully crafted adversarial examples. Many advanced algorithms have been proposed to generate adversarial examples by leveraging the L_p distance for penalizing perturbations. Different defense methods have also been explored to defend against such adversarial attacks. While the effectiveness of L_p distance as a metric of perceptual quality remains an active research area, in this paper we will instead focus on a different type of perturbation, namely spatial transformation, as opposed to manipulating the pixel values directly as in prior works. Perturbations generated through spatial transformation could result in large L_p distance measures, but our extensive experiments show that such spatially transformed adversarial examples are perceptually realistic and more difficult to defend against with existing defense systems. This potentially provides a new direction in adversarial example generation and the design of corresponding defenses. We visualize the spatial transformation based perturbation for different examples and show that our technique can produce realistic adversarial examples with smooth image deformation. Finally, we visualize the attention of deep networks with different types of adversarial examples to better understand how these examples are interpreted.