Signal Processing - November 2017 - 53

Observe that classification robustness is strongly related
to support vector machine (SVM) classifiers, whose goal is to
maximize the robustness, defined as the margin between support vectors. Importantly, the max-margin classifier in a given
family of classifiers might, however, still not achieve robustness (in the sense of high t ( f )). An illustration is provided in
"Robustness and Risk: A Toy Example," where a no zero-risk
linear classifier-in particular, the max-margin classifier-
achieves robustness to perturbations. Our focus in this article
is turned toward assessing the robustness of the family of deep
neural network classifiers that are used in many visual recognition tasks.

Perturbation forms
Robustness to additive perturbations
We first start by considering the case where the perturbation
operator is simply additive; i.e., Tr (x) = x + r. In this case, the
magnitude of the perturbation can be measured with the , p norm
of the minimal perturbation that is necessary to change the label
of a classifier. According to (2), the robustness to additive perturbations of a data point x is defined as
	

min
r
r!R

p

subject to f (x + r) ! f (x).(4)

Depending on the conditions that one sets on the set R that supports the perturbations, the additive model leads to different
forms of robustness.

Adversarial perturbations
We first consider the case where the additive perturbations are
unconstrained (i.e., R = X ) . The perturbation obtained by solving (4) is often referred to as an adversarial perturbation, as it
corresponds to the perturbation that an adversary (having full
knowledge of the model) would apply to change the label of the
classifier, while causing minimal changes to the original image.
The optimization problem in (4) is nonconvex, as the constraint involves the (potentially highly complex) classification
function f. Different techniques exist to approximate adversarial
perturbations. In the following, we briefly mention some of the
existing algorithms for computing adversarial perturbations:
■■ Regularized variant [1]: The method in [1] computes adversarial perturbations by solving a regularized variant of the
problem in (4), given by
	

min
c r
r

p

+ J (x + r, yu , i), (5)

where yu is a target label of the perturbed sample, J is a loss function, c is a regularization parameter, and i is the model parameters. In the original formulation [1], an additional constraint
is added to guarantee x + r ! [0, 1], which is omitted in (5)
for simplicity. To solve the optimization problem in (5), a line
search is performed over c to find the maximum c 2 0 for
which the minimizer of (5) satisfies f (x + r) = yu . While leading to very accurate estimates, this approach can be costly to
compute on high-dimensional and large-scale data sets. More-

over, it computes targeted adversarial perturbations, where the
target label is known.
■■ Fast gradient sign (FGS) [11]: This solution estimates an
untargeted adversarial perturbation by going in the direction
of the sign of gradient of the loss function:
e sign ^ d x J (x, y (x), i) h,

where J, the loss function, is used to train the neural network and
i denotes the model parameters. While efficient, this one-step
algorithm provides a coarse approximation to the solution of the
optimization problem in (4) for p = 3.
■■ DeepFool [5]: This algorithm minimizes (4) through an iterative procedure, where each iteration involves the linearization
of the constraint. The linearized (constrained) problem is
solved in closed form at each iteration, and the current estimate is updated; the optimization procedure terminates when
the current estimate of the perturbation fools the classifier. In
practice, DeepFool provides a tradeoff between the accuracy
and efficiency of the two previous approaches [5].
In addition to the aforementioned optimization methods, several other approaches have recently been proposed
to compute adversarial perturbations, see, e.g., [9], [12], and
[13]. Different from the previously mentioned gradient-based
techniques, the recent work in [14] learns a network (the
adversarial transformation network) to efficiently generate a
set of perturbations with a large diversity, without requiring
the computation of the gradients.
Using the aforementioned optimization techniques, one
can compute the robustness of classifiers to additive adversarial perturbations. Quite surprisingly, deep networks are
extremely vulnerable to such additive perturbations; i.e.,
small and even imperceptible adversarial perturbations can
be computed to fool them with high probability. For example,
the average perturbations required to fool the CaffeNet [15]
and GoogleNet [16] architectures on the ILSVRC 2012 task
[17] are 100 times smaller than the typical norm of natural
images [5] when using the , 2 norm. The high instability of
deep neural networks to adversarial perturbations, which
was first highlighted in [1], shows that these networks rely
heavily on proxy concepts to classify objects, as opposed to
strong visual concepts typically used by humans to distinguish between objects.
To illustrate this idea, we consider once again the toy classification example (see "Robustness and Risk: A Toy Example"),
where the goal is to classify images based on the orientation of
the stripe. In this example, linear classifiers could achieve a perfect recognition rate by exploiting the imperceptibly small bias
that separates the two classes. While this proxy concept achieves
zero risk, it is not robust to perturbations: one could design an
additive perturbation that is as simple as a minor variation of the
bias, which is sufficient to induce data misclassification. On the
same line of thought, the high instability of classifiers to additive
perturbations observed in [1] suggests that deep neural networks
potentially capture one of the proxy concepts that separate the
different classes. Through a quantitative analysis of polynomial

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

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November 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - November 2017

Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover1
Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover2
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 1
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 2
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 3
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 4
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 5
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 6
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 7
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 8
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Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover3
Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover4
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