NCIS: Neural Contextual Iterative Smoothing for Purifying Adversarial Perturbations

Sungmin Cha, Naeun Ko, Heewoong Choi, Youngjoon Yoo, Taesup Moon; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 3789-3799

We propose a novel and effective purification-based adversarial defense method against pre-processor blind white- and black-box attacks, without requiring any adversarial training or retraining of the classification model. Based on the observation of the adversarial noise, we propose a simple iterative Gaussian Smoothing (GS) that smoothes out adversarial noise and achieves substantially high robust accuracy. To further improve the method, we propose Neural Contextual Iterative Smoothing (NCIS), which trains a blind-spot network (BSN) in a self-supervised manner to reconstruct the discriminative features of the smoothed original image. From the extensive experiments on the large-scale ImageNet, we show that our method achieves both competitive standard accuracy and state-of-the-art robust accuracy against most strong purifier-blind white- and black-box attacks. Also, we propose a new evaluation benchmark based on commercial image classification APIs, including AWS, Azure, Clarifai, and Google, and demonstrate that users can use our method to increase the adversarial robustness of APIs.