A Certified Radius-Guided Attack Framework to Image Segmentation Models

Image segmentation is an important problem in many safety-critical applications such as medical imaging and autonomous driving. Recent studies show that modern image segmentation models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, while existing attack methods mainly follow the idea of attacking image classification models. We argue that image segmentation and classification have inherent differences, and design an attack framework specially for image segmentation models. Our goal is to thoroughly explore the vulnerabilities of modern segmentation models, i.e., aiming to misclassify as many pixels as possible under a perturbation budget in both white-box and black-box settings.Our attack framework is inspired by certified radius, which was originally used by defenders to defend against adversarial perturbations to classification models. We are the first, from the attacker perspective, to leverage the properties of certified radius and propose a certified radius guided attack framework against image segmentation models. Specifically, we first adapt randomized smoothing, the state-of-the-art certification method for classification models, to derive the pixel’s certified radius. A larger certified radius of a pixel means the pixel is theoretically more robust to adversarial perturbations. This observation inspires us to focus more on disrupting pixels with relatively smaller certified radii. Accordingly, we design a pixel-wise certified radius guided loss, when plugged into any existing white-box attack, yields our certified radius-guided white-box attack.Next, we propose the first black-box attack to image segmentation models via bandit. A key challenge is no gradient information is available. To address it, we design a novel gradient estimator, based on bandit feedback, which is query-efficient and provably unbiased and stable. We use this gradient estimator to design a projected bandit gradient descent (PBGD) attack. We further use pixels’ certified radii and design a certified radius-guided PBGD (CR-PBGD) attack. We prove our PBGD and CR-PBGD attacks can achieve asymptotically optimal attack performance with an optimal rate. We evaluate our certified-radius guided white-box and black-box attacks on multiple modern image segmentation models and datasets. Our results validate the effectiveness of our certified radius-guided attack framework.