Benchmarking Adversarial Robustness on Image Classification

Yinpeng Dong, Qi-An Fu, Xiao Yang, Tianyu Pang, Hang Su, Zihao Xiao, Jun Zhu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 321-331

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which becomes one of the most important research problems in the development of deep learning. While a lot of efforts have been made in recent years, it is of great significance to perform correct and complete evaluations of the adversarial attack and defense algorithms. In this paper, we establish a comprehensive, rigorous, and coherent benchmark to evaluate adversarial robustness on image classification tasks. After briefly reviewing plenty of representative attack and defense methods, we perform large-scale experiments with two robustness curves as the fair-minded evaluation criteria to fully understand the performance of these methods. Based on the evaluation results, we draw several important findings that can provide insights for future research, including: 1) The relative robustness between models can change across different attack configurations, thus it is encouraged to adopt the robustness curves to evaluate adversarial robustness; 2) As one of the most effective defense techniques, adversarial training can generalize across different threat models; 3) Randomization-based defenses are more robust to query-based black-box attacks.