PatchZero: Defending Against Adversarial Patch Attacks by Detecting and Zeroing the Patch

Ke Xu, Yao Xiao, Zhaoheng Zheng, Kaijie Cai, Ram Nevatia; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 4632-4641

Adversarial patch attacks mislead neural networks by injecting adversarial pixels within a local region. Patch attacks can be highly effective in a variety of tasks and physically realizable via attachment (e.g. a sticker) to the real-world objects. Despite the diversity in attack patterns, adversarial patches tend to be highly textured and different in appearance from natural images. We exploit this property and present PatchZero, a general defense pipeline against white-box adversarial patches without retraining the downstream classifier or detector. Specifically, our defense detects adversaries at the pixel-level and "zeros out" the patch region by repainting with mean pixel values. We further design a two-stage adversarial training scheme to defend against the stronger adaptive attacks. PatchZero achieves SOTA defense performance on the image classification (ImageNet, RESISC45), object detection (PASCAL VOC), and video classification (UCF101) tasks with little degradation in benign performance. In addition, PatchZero transfers to different patch shapes and attack types.