ViTGuard: Attention-aware Detection against Adversarial Examples for Vision Transformer

The use of transformers for vision tasks has challenged the traditional dominant role of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in computer vision (CV). For image classification tasks, Vision Transformer (ViT) effectively establishes spatial relationships between patches within images, directing attention to important areas for accurate predictions. However, similar to CNNs, ViTs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which mislead the image classifier into making incorrect decisions on images with carefully designed perturbations. Moreover, adversarial patch attacks, which introduce arbitrary perturbations within a small area (usually less than 3% of pixels), pose a more serious threat to ViTs. Even worse, traditional detection methods, originally designed for CNN models, are impractical or suffer significant performance degradation when applied to ViTs, and they generally overlook patch attacks.In this paper, we propose ViTGuard as a general detection method for defending ViT models against adversarial attacks, including typical attacks where perturbations spread over the entire input (Lp norm attacks) and patch attacks. ViTGuard uses a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) model to recover randomly masked patches from the unmasked regions, providing a flexible image reconstruction strategy. Then, threshold-based detectors leverage distinctive ViT features, including attention maps and classification (CLS) token representations, to distinguish between normal and adversarial samples. The MAE model does not involve any adversarial samples during training, ensuring the effectiveness of our detectors against unseen attacks. ViTGuard is compared with seven existing detection methods under nine attacks across three datasets with different sizes. The evaluation results show the superiority of ViTGuard over existing detectors. Finally, considering the potential detection evasion, we further demonstrate ViTGuard’s robustness against adaptive attacks for evasion.