Learning to Characterize Adversarial Subspaces

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to the maliciously generated adversarial examples. To detect these adversarial examples, previous methods use artificially designed metrics to characterize the properties of adversarial subspaces where adversarial examples lie. However, we find these methods are not working in practical attack detection scenarios. Because the artificially defined features are lack of robustness and show limitation in discriminative power to detect strong attacks. To solve this problem, we propose a novel adversarial detection method which identifies adversaries by adaptively learning reasonable metrics to characterize adversarial subspaces. As auxiliary context information, k nearest neighbors are used to represent the surrounded subspace of the detected sample. We propose an innovative model called Neighbor Context Encoder (NCE) to learn from k neighbors context and infer if the detected sample is normal or adversarial. We conduct thorough experiment on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet dataset. The results demonstrate that our approach surpasses all existing methods under three settings: attack-aware black-box detection, attack-unaware black-box detection and white-box detection.