Nonlinear Projection Based Gradient Estimation for Query Efficient Blackbox Attacks

Huichen Li, Linyi Li, Xiaojun Xu, Xiaolu Zhang, Shuang Yang, Bo Li

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

Gradient estimation and vector space projection have been studied as two distinct topics. We aim to bridge the gap between the two by investigating how to efficiently estimate gradient based on a projected low-dimensional space. We first provide lower and upper bounds for gradient estimation under both linear and nonlinear gradient projections, and outline checkable sufficient conditions under which one is better than the other. Moreover, we analyze the query complexity for the projection-based gradient estimation and present a sufficient condition for query-efficient estimators. Built upon our theoretic analysis, we propose a novel query-efficient Nonlinear Gradient Projection-based Boundary Blackbox Attack (NonLinear-BA). We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets: ImageNet, CelebA, CIFAR-10, and MNIST, and show the superiority of the proposed methods compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. In particular, we show that the projection-based boundary blackbox attacks are able to achieve much smaller magnitude of perturbations with 100% attack success rate based on efficient queries. Both linear and nonlinear projections demonstrate their advantages under different conditions. We also evaluate NonLinear-BA against the commercial online API MEGVII Face++, and demonstrate the high blackbox attack performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/NonLinear-BA.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3142-3150
Number of pages9
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume130
StatePublished - 2021
Event24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Apr 13 2021Apr 15 2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Statistics and Probability

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