Adaptive Adversarial Attack on Scene Text Recognition

Recent studies have shown that state-of-the-art deep learning models are vulnerable to the inputs with small perturbations (adversarial examples). We observe two critical obstacles in adversarial examples: (i) Recent adversarial attacks require manually tuning hyper-parameters and take a long time to construct an adversarial example, making it impractical to attack real-time systems; (ii) Most of the studies focus on non-sequential tasks, such as image classification, yet only a few consider sequential tasks. In this work, we propose an adaptive approach to speed up adversarial attacks, especially on sequential learning tasks. By leveraging the uncertainty of each task, we directly learn the adaptive multi-task weightings, without manually searching hyper-parameters. A unified architecture is developed and evaluated for both non-sequential tasks and sequential ones. To evaluate the effectiveness, we take the scene text recognition task as a case study. To our best knowledge, our proposed method is the first attempt to adversarial attack for scene text recognition. Adaptive Attack achieves over 99.9% success rate with 3 ~ 6× speedup compared to state-of-the-art adversarial attacks.