Towards Transferable Targeted Adversarial Examples

Zhibo Wang, Hongshan Yang, Yunhe Feng, Peng Sun, Hengchang Guo, Zhifei Zhang, Kui Ren; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 20534-20543

Transferability of adversarial examples is critical for black-box deep learning model attacks. While most existing studies focus on enhancing the transferability of untargeted adversarial attacks, few of them studied how to generate transferable targeted adversarial examples that can mislead models into predicting a specific class. Moreover, existing transferable targeted adversarial attacks usually fail to sufficiently characterize the target class distribution, thus suffering from limited transferability. In this paper, we propose the Transferable Targeted Adversarial Attack (TTAA), which can capture the distribution information of the target class from both label-wise and feature-wise perspectives, to generate highly transferable targeted adversarial examples. To this end, we design a generative adversarial training framework consisting of a generator to produce targeted adversarial examples, and feature-label dual discriminators to distinguish the generated adversarial examples from the target class images. Specifically, we design the label discriminator to guide the adversarial examples to learn label-related distribution information about the target class. Meanwhile, we design a feature discriminator, which extracts the feature-wise information with strong cross-model consistency, to enable the adversarial examples to learn the transferable distribution information. Furthermore, we introduce the random perturbation dropping to further enhance the transferability by augmenting the diversity of adversarial examples used in the training process. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on the transferability of targeted adversarial examples. The targeted fooling rate reaches 95.13% when transferred from VGG-19 to DenseNet-121, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.