AdvDrop: Adversarial Attack to DNNs by Dropping Information

Ranjie Duan, Yuefeng Chen, Dantong Niu, Yun Yang, A. K. Qin, Yuan He; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 7506-7515

Human can easily recognize visual objects with lost information: even losing most details with only contour reserved, e.g. cartoon. However, in terms of visual perception of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), the ability for recognizing abstract objects (visual objects with lost information) is still a challenge. In this work, we investigate this issue from an adversarial viewpoint: will the performance of DNNs decrease even for the images only losing a little information? Towards this end, we propose a novel adversarial attack, named AdvDrop, which crafts adversarial examples by dropping existing information of images. Previously, most adversarial attacks add extra disturbing information on clean images explicitly. Opposite to previous works, our proposed work explores the adversarial robustness of DNN models in a novel perspective by dropping imperceptible details to craft adversarial examples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AdvDrop by extensive experiments, and show that this new type of adversarial examples is more difficult to be defended by current defense systems.