Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples

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Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015

EXPLAINING AND HARNESSING

ADVERSARIAL EXAMPLES

Ian J. Goodfellow, Jonathon Shlens & Christian Szegedy

Google Inc., Mountain View, CA

{goodfellow,shlens,szegedy}@google.com

ABSTRACT

Several machine learning models, including neural networks, consistently mis-

classify adversarial examples—inputs formed by applying small but intentionally

worst-case perturbations to examples from the dataset, such that the perturbed in-

put results in the model outputting an incorrect answer with high confidence. Early

attempts at explaining this phenomenon focused on nonlinearity and overfitting.

We argue instead that the primary cause of neural networks’ vulnerability to ad-

versarial perturbation is their linear nature. This explanation is supported by new

quantitative results while giving the first explanation of the most intriguing fact

about them: their generalization across architectures and training sets. Moreover,

this view yields a simple and fast method of generating adversarial examples. Us-

ing this approach to provide examples for adversarial training, we reduce the test

set error of a maxout network on the MNIST dataset.

1

INTRODUCTION

Szegedy et al. (2014b) made an intriguing discovery: several machine learning models, including

state-of-the-art neural networks, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. That is, these machine

learning models misclassify examples that are only slightly different from correctly classified exam-

ples drawn from the data distribution. In many cases, a wide variety of models with different archi-

tectures trained on different subsets of the training data misclassify the same adversarial example.

This suggests that adversarial examples expose fundamental blind spots in our training algorithms.

The cause of these adversarial examples was a mystery, and speculative explanations have suggested

it is due to extreme nonlinearity of deep neural networks, perhaps combined with insufficient model

averaging and insufficient regularization of the purely supervised learning problem. We show that

these speculative hypotheses are unnecessary. Linear behavior in high-dimensional spaces is suf-

ficient to cause adversarial examples. This view enables us to design a fast method of generating

adversarial examples that makes adversarial training practical. We show that adversarial training can

provide an additional regularization benefit beyond that provided by using dropout (Srivastava et al.,

2014) alone. Generic regularization strategies such as dropout, pretraining, and model averaging do

not confer a significant reduction in a model’s vulnerability to adversarial examples, but changing

to nonlinear model families such as RBF networks can do so.

Our explanation suggests a fundamental tension between designing models that are easy to train due

to their linearity and designing models that use nonlinear effects to resist adversarial perturbation.

In the long run, it may be possible to escape this tradeoff by designing more powerful optimization

methods that can succesfully train more nonlinear models.

2 RELATED WORK

Szegedy et al. (2014b) demonstrated a variety of intriguing properties of neural networks and related

models. Those most relevant to this paper include:

• Box-constrained L-BFGS can reliably find adversarial examples.

• On some datasets, such as ImageNet (Deng et al., 2009), the adversarial examples were so

close to the original examples that the differences were indistinguishable to the human eye.

• The same adversarial example is often misclassified by a variety of classifiers with different

architectures or trained on different subsets of the training data.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015

• Shallow softmax regression models are also vulnerable to adversarial examples.

• Training on adversarial examples can regularize the model—however, this was not practical

at the time due to the need for expensive constrained optimization in the inner loop.

These results suggest that classifiers based on modern machine learning techniques, even those

that obtain excellent performance on the test set, are not learning the true underlying concepts that

determine the correct output label. Instead, these algorithms have built a Potemkin village that works

well on naturally occuring data, but is exposed as a fake when one visits points in space that do not

have high probability in the data distribution. This is particularly disappointing because a popular

approach in computer vision is to use convolutional network features as a space where Euclidean

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distance approximates perceptual distance. This resemblance is clearly flawed if images that have an

immeasurably small perceptual distance correspond to completely different classes in the network’s

representation.

These results have often been interpreted as being a flaw in deep networks in particular, even though

linear classifiers have the same problem. We regard the knowledge of this flaw as an opportunity to

fix it. Indeed, Gu & Rigazio (2014) and Chalupka et al. (2014) have already begun the first steps

toward designing models that resist adversarial perturbation, though no model has yet succesfully

done so while maintaining state of the art accuracy on clean inputs.

3 THE LINEAR EXPLANATION OF ADVERSARIAL EXAMPLES

We start with explaining the existence of adversarial examples for linear models.

In many problems, the precision of an individual input feature is limited. For example, digital

images often use only 8 bits per pixel so they discard all information below 1/255 of the dynamic

range. Because the precision of the features is limited, it is not rational for the classifier to respond

differently to an input x than to an adversarial input ˜x = x + η if every element of the perturbation

η is smaller than the precision of the features. Formally, for problems with well-separated classes,

we expect the classifier to assign the same class to x and ˜x so long as ||η||∞ < (cid:15), where (cid:15) is small

enough to be discarded by the sensor or data storage apparatus associated with our problem.

Consider the dot product between a weight vector w and an adversarial example ˜x:

w(cid:62) ˜x = w(cid:62)x + w(cid:62)η.

The adversarial perturbation causes the activation to grow by w(cid:62)η.We can maximize this increase

subject to the max norm constraint on η by assigning η = sign(w). If w has n dimensions and the

average magnitude of an element of the weight vector is m, then the activation will grow by (cid:15)mn.

Since ||η||∞ does not grow with the dimensionality of the problem but the change in activation

caused by perturbation by η can grow linearly with n, then for high dimensional problems, we can

make many infinitesimal changes to the input that add up to one large change to the output. We

can think of this as a sort of “accidental steganography,” where a linear model is forced to attend

exclusively to the signal that aligns most closely with its weights, even if multiple signals are present

and other signals have much greater amplitude.

This explanation shows that a simple linear model can have adversarial examples if its input has suf-

ficient dimensionality. Previous explanations for adversarial examples invoked hypothesized prop-

erties of neural networks, such as their supposed highly non-linear nature. Our hypothesis based

on linearity is simpler, and can also explain why softmax regression is vulnerable to adversarial

examples.

4 LINEAR PERTURBATION OF NON-LINEAR MODELS

The linear view of adversarial examples suggests a fast way of generating them. We hypothesize

that neural networks are too linear to resist linear adversarial perturbation. LSTMs (Hochreiter &

Schmidhuber, 1997), ReLUs (Jarrett et al., 2009; Glorot et al., 2011), and maxout networks (Good-

fellow et al., 2013c) are all intentionally designed to behave in very linear ways, so that they are

easier to optimize. More nonlinear models such as sigmoid networks are carefully tuned to spend

most of their time in the non-saturating, more linear regime for the same reason. This linear behavior

suggests that cheap, analytical perturbations of a linear model should also damage neural networks.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015

+ .007 ×

=

x

“panda”

57.7% confidence

sign(∇xJ(θ, x, y))

“nematode”

8.2% confidence

x +

(cid:15)sign(∇xJ(θ, x, y))

“gibbon”

99.3 % confidence

Figure 1: A demonstration of fast adversarial example generation applied to GoogLeNet (Szegedy

et al., 2014a) on ImageNet. By adding an imperceptibly small vector whose elements are equal to

the sign of the elements of the gradient of the cost function with respect to the input, we can change

GoogLeNet’s classification of the image. Here our (cid:15) of .007 corresponds to the magnitude of the

smallest bit of an 8 bit image encoding after GoogLeNet’s conversion to real numbers.

Let θ be the parameters of a model, x the input to the model, y the targets associated with x (for

machine learning tasks that have targets) and J(θ, x, y) be the cost used to train the neural network.

We can linearize the cost function around the current value of θ, obtaining an optimal max-norm

constrained pertubation of

η = (cid:15)sign (∇xJ(θ, x, y)) .

We refer to this as the “fast gradient sign method” of generating adversarial examples. Note that the

required gradient can be computed efficiently using backpropagation.

We find that this method reliably causes a wide variety of models to misclassify their input. See

Fig. 1 for a demonstration on ImageNet. We find that using (cid:15) = .25, we cause a shallow softmax

classifier to have an error rate of 99.9% with an average confidence of 79.3% on the MNIST (?) test

set1. In the same setting, a maxout network misclassifies 89.4% of our adversarial examples with

an average confidence of 97.6%. Similarly, using (cid:15) = .1, we obtain an error rate of 87.15% and

an average probability of 96.6% assigned to the incorrect labels when using a convolutional maxout

network on a preprocessed version of the CIFAR-10 (Krizhevsky & Hinton, 2009) test set2. Other

simple methods of generating adversarial examples are possible. For example, we also found that

rotating x by a small angle in the direction of the gradient reliably produces adversarial examples.

The fact that these simple, cheap algorithms are able to generate misclassified examples serves as

evidence in favor of our interpretation of adversarial examples as a result of linearity. The algorithms

are also useful as a way of speeding up adversarial training or even just analysis of trained networks.

5 ADVERSARIAL TRAINING OF LINEAR MODELS VERSUS WEIGHT DECAY

Perhaps the simplest possible model we can consider is logistic regression. In this case, the fast

gradient sign method is exact. We can use this case to gain some intuition for how adversarial

examples are generated in a simple setting. See Fig. 2 for instructive images.

If we train a single model to recognize labels y ∈ {−1, 1} with P (y = 1) = σ (cid:0)w(cid:62)x + b(cid:1) where

σ(z) is the logistic sigmoid function, then training consists of gradient descent on

Ex,y∼pdata ζ(−y(w(cid:62)x + b))

where ζ(z) = log (1 + exp(z)) is the softplus function. We can derive a simple analytical form for

training on the worst-case adversarial perturbation of x rather than x itself, based on gradient sign

1This is using MNIST pixel values in the interval [0, 1]. MNIST data does contain values other than 0 or

1, but the images are essentially binary. Each pixel roughly encodes “ink” or “no ink”. This justifies expecting

the classifier to be able to handle perturbations within a range of width 0.5, and indeed human observers can

read such images without difficulty.

2 See https://github.com/lisa-lab/pylearn2/tree/master/pylearn2/scripts/

papers/maxout. for the preprocessing code, which yields a standard deviation of roughly 0.5.

3

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 2: The fast gradient sign method applied to logistic regression (where it is not an approxi-

mation, but truly the most damaging adversarial example in the max norm box). a) The weights of

a logistic regression model trained on MNIST. b) The sign of the weights of a logistic regression

model trained on MNIST. This is the optimal perturbation. Even though the model has low capacity

and is fit well, this perturbation is not readily recognizable to a human observer as having anything

to do with the relationship between 3s and 7s. c) MNIST 3s and 7s. The logistic regression model

has a 1.6% error rate on the 3 versus 7 discrimination task on these examples. d) Fast gradient sign

adversarial examples for the logistic regression model with (cid:15) = .25. The logistic regression model

has an error rate of 99% on these examples.

perturbation. Note that the sign of the gradient is just −sign(w), and that w(cid:62)sign(w) = ||w||1.

The adversarial version of logistic regression is therefore to minimize

Ex,y∼pdataζ(y((cid:15)||w||1 − w(cid:62)x − b)).

This is somewhat similar to L1 regularization. However, there are some important differences. Most

significantly, the L1 penalty is subtracted off the model’s activation during training, rather than

added to the training cost. This means that the penalty can eventually start to disappear if the model

learns to make confident enough predictions that ζ saturates. This is not guaranteed to happen—in

the underfitting regime, adversarial training will simply worsen underfitting. We can thus view L1

weight decay as being more “worst case” than adversarial training, because it fails to deactivate in

the case of good margin.

If we move beyond logistic regression to multiclass softmax regression, L1 weight decay becomes

even more pessimistic, because it treats each of the softmax’s outputs as independently perturbable,

when in fact it is usually not possible to find a single η that aligns with all of the class’s weight

vectors. Weight decay overestimates the damage achievable with perturbation even more in the case

of a deep network with multiple hidden units. Because L1 weight decay overestimates the amount

of damage an adversary can do, it is necessary to use a smaller L1 weight decay coefficient than

the (cid:15) associated with the precision of our features. When training maxout networks on MNIST, we

obtained good results using adversarial training with (cid:15) = .25. When applying L1 weight decay to

the first layer, we found that even a coefficient of .0025 was too large, and caused the model to get

stuck with over 5% error on the training set. Smaller weight decay coefficients permitted succesful

training but conferred no regularization benefit.

6 ADVERSARIAL TRAINING OF DEEP NETWORKS

The criticism of deep networks as vulnerable to adversarial examples is somewhat misguided, be-

cause unlike shallow linear models, deep networks are at least able to represent functions that resist

adversarial perturbation. The universal approximator theorem (Hornik et al., 1989) guarantees that

a neural network with at least one hidden layer can represent any function to an arbitary degree of

accuracy so long as its hidden layer is permitted to have enough units. Shallow linear models are

not able to become constant near training points while also assigning different outputs to different

training points.

Of course, the universal approximator theorem does not say anything about whether a training al-

gorithm will be able to discover a function with all of the desired properties. Obviously, standard

supervised training does not specify that the chosen function be resistant to adversarial examples.

This must be encoded in the training procedure somehow.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015

Szegedy et al. (2014b) showed that by training on a mixture of adversarial and clean examples, a

neural network could be regularized somewhat. Training on adversarial examples is somewhat dif-

ferent from other data augmentation schemes; usually, one augments the data with transformations

such as translations that are expected to actually occur in the test set. This form of data augmenta-

tion instead uses inputs that are unlikely to occur naturally but that expose flaws in the ways that the

model conceptualizes its decision function. At the time, this procedure was never demonstrated to

improve beyond dropout on a state of the art benchmark. However, this was partially because it was

difficult to experiment extensively with expensive adversarial examples based on L-BFGS.

We found that training with an adversarial objective function based on the fast gradient sign method

was an effective regularizer:

˜J(θ, x, y) = αJ(θ, x, y) + (1 − α)J(θ, x + (cid:15)sign (∇xJ(θ, x, y)) .

In all of our experiments, we used α = 0.5. Other values may work better; our initial guess of this

hyperparameter worked well enough that we did not feel the need to explore more. This approach

means that we continually update our supply of adversarial examples, to make them resist the current

version of the model. Using this approach to train a maxout network that was also regularized with

dropout, we were able to reduce the error rate from 0.94% without adversarial training to 0.84%

with adversarial training.

We observed that we were not reaching zero error rate on adversarial examples on the training set.

We fixed this problem by making two changes. First, we made the model larger, using 1600 units per

layer rather than the 240 used by the original maxout network for this problem. Without adversarial

training, this causes the model to overfit slightly, and get an error rate of 1.14% on the test set.

With adversarial training, we found that the validation set error leveled off over time, and made

very slow progress. The original maxout result uses early stopping, and terminates learning after

the validation set error rate has not decreased for 100 epochs. We found that while the validation set

error was very flat, the adversarial validation set error was not. We therefore used early stopping

on the adversarial validation set error. Using this criterion to choose the number of epochs to train

for, we then retrained on all 60,000 examples. Five different training runs using different seeds

for the random number generators used to select minibatches of training examples, initialize model

weights, and generate dropout masks result in four trials that each had an error rate of 0.77% on

the test set and one trial that had an error rate of 0.83%. The average of 0.782% is the best result

reported on the permutation invariant version of MNIST, though statistically indistinguishable from

the result obtained by fine-tuning DBMs with dropout (Srivastava et al., 2014) at 0.79%.

The model also became somewhat resistant to adversarial examples. Recall that without adversarial

training, this same kind of model had an error rate of 89.4% on adversarial examples based on the fast

gradient sign method. With adversarial training, the error rate fell to 17.9%. Adversarial examples

are transferable between the two models but with the adversarially trained model showing greater

robustness. Adversarial examples generated via the original model yield an error rate of 19.6% on

the adversarially trained model, while adversarial examples generated via the new model yield an

error rate of 40.9% on the original model. When the adversarially trained model does misclassify an

adversarial example, its predictions are unfortunately still highly confident. The average confidence

on a misclassified example was 81.4%. We also found that the weights of the learned model changed

significantly, with the weights of the adversarially trained model being significantly more localized

and interpretable (see Fig. 3).

The adversarial training procedure can be seen as minimizing the worst case error when the data is

perturbed by an adversary. That can be interpreted as learning to play an adversarial game, or as

minimizing an upper bound on the expected cost over noisy samples with noise from U (−(cid:15), (cid:15)) added

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to the inputs. Adversarial training can also be seen as a form of active learning, where the model

is able to request labels on new points. In this case the human labeler is replaced with a heuristic

labeler that copies labels from nearby points.

We could also regularize the model to be insensitive to changes in its features that are smaller than

the (cid:15) precision simply by training on all points within the (cid:15) max norm box, or sampling many points

within this box. This corresponds to adding noise with max norm (cid:15) during training. However, noise

with zero mean and zero covariance is very inefficient at preventing adversarial examples. The

expected dot product between any reference vector and such a noise vector is zero. This means that

in many cases the noise will have essentially no effect rather than yielding a more difficult input.

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Figure 3: Weight visualizations of maxout networks trained on MNIST. Each row shows the filters

for a single maxout unit. Left) Naively trained model. Right) Model with adversarial training.

In fact, in many cases the noise will actualy result in a lower objective function value. We can

think of adversarial training as doing hard example mining among the set of noisy inputs, in order

to train more efficiently by considering only those noisy points that strongly resist classification. As

control experiments, we trained training a maxout network with noise based on randomly adding

±(cid:15) to each pixel, or adding noise in U (−(cid:15), (cid:15)) to each pixel. These obtained an error rate of 86.2%

with confidence 97.3% and an error rate of 90.4% with a confidence of 97.8% respectively on fast

gradient sign adversarial examples.

Because the derivative of the sign function is zero or undefined everywhere, gradient descent on

the adversarial objective function based on the fast gradient sign method does not allow the model

to anticipate how the adversary will react to changes in the parameters. If we instead adversarial

examples based on small rotations or addition of the scaled gradient, then the perturbation process

is itself differentiable and the learning can take the reaction of the adversary into account. However,

we did not find nearly as powerful of a regularizing result from this process, perhaps because these

kinds of adversarial examples are not as difficult to solve.

One natural question is whether it is better to perturb the input or the hidden layers or both. Here

the results are inconsistent. Szegedy et al. (2014b) reported that adversarial perturbations yield the

best regularization when applied to the hidden layers. That result was obtained on a sigmoidal

network. In our experiments with the fast gradient sign method, we find that networks with hidden

units whose activations are unbounded simply respond by making their hidden unit activations very

large, so it is usually better to just perturb the original input. On saturating models such as the Rust

model we found that perturbation of the input performed comparably to perturbation of the hidden

layers. Perturbations based on rotating the hidden layers solve the problem of unbounded activations

growing to make additive perturbations smaller by comparison. We were able to succesfully train

maxout networks with rotational perturbations of the hidden layers. However, this did not yield

nearly as strong of a regularizing effect as additive perturbation of the input layer. Our view of

adversarial training is that it is only clearly useful when the model has the capacity to learn to

resist adversarial examples. This is only clearly the case when a universal approximator theorem

applies. Because the last layer of a neural network, the linear-sigmoid or linear-softmax layer, is

not a universal approximator of functions of the final hidden layer, this suggests that one is likely

to encounter problems with underfitting when applying adversarial perturbations to the final hidden

layer. We indeed found this effect. Our best results with training using perturbations of hidden

layers never involved perturbations of the final hidden layer.

7 DIFFERENT KINDS OF MODEL CAPACITY

One reason that the existence of adversarial examples can seem counter-intuitive is that most of us

have poor intuitions for high dimensional spaces. We live in three dimensions, so we are not used

to small effects in hundreds of dimensions adding up to create a large effect. There is another way

that our intuitions serve us poorly. Many people think of models with low capacity as being unable

to make many different confident predictions. This is not correct. Some models with low capacity

do exhibit this behavior. For example shallow RBF networks with

p(y = 1 | x) = exp (cid:0)(x − µ)(cid:62)β(x − µ)(cid:1)

are only able to confidently predict that the positive class is present in the vicinity of µ. Elsewhere,

they default to predicting the class is absent, or have low-confidence predictions.

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Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015

RBF networks are naturally immune to adversarial examples, in the sense that they have low con-

fidence when they are fooled. A shallow RBF network with no hidden layers gets an error rate

of 55.4% on MNIST using adversarial examples generated with the fast gradient sign method and

(cid:15) = .25. However, its confidence on mistaken examples is only 1.2%. Its average confidence on

clean test examples is 60.6%. We can’t expect a model with such low capacity to get the right an-

swer at all points of space, but it does correctly respond by reducing its confidence considerably on

points it does not “understand.”

RBF units are unfortunately not invariant to any significant transformations so they cannot generalize

very well. We can view linear units and RBF units as different points on a precision-recall tradeoff

curve. Linear units achieve high recall by responding to every input in a certain direction, but may

have low precision due to responding too strongly in unfamiliar situations. RBF units achieve high

precision by responding only to a specific point in space, but in doing so sacrifice recall. Motivated

by this idea, we decided to explore a variety of models involving quadratic units, including deep

RBF networks. We found this to be a difficult task—very model with sufficient quadratic inhibition

to resist adversarial perturbation obtained high training set error when trained with SGD.

8 WHY DO ADVERSARIAL EXAMPLES GENERALIZE?

An intriguing aspect of adversarial examples is that an example generated for one model is often

misclassified by other models, even when they have different architecures or were trained on dis-

joint training sets. Moreover, when these different models misclassify an adversarial example, they

often agree with each other on its class. Explanations based on extreme non-linearity and over-

fitting cannot readily account for this behavior—why should multiple extremely non-linear model

with excess capacity consistently label out-of-distribution points in the same way? This behavior is

especially surprising from the view of the hypothesis that adversarial examples finely tile space like

the rational numbers among the reals, because in this view adversarial examples are common but

occur only at very precise locations.

Under the linear view, adversarial examples occur in broad subspaces. The direction η need only

have positive dot product with the gradient of the cost function, and (cid:15) need only be large enough.

Fig. 4 demonstrates this phenomenon. By tracing out different values of (cid:15) we see that adversarial

examples occur in contiguous regions of the 1-D subspace defined by the fast gradient sign method,

not in fine pockets. This explains why adversarial examples are abundant and why an example

misclassified by one classifier has a fairly high prior probability of being misclassified by another

classifier.

To explain why mutiple classifiers assign the same class to adversarial examples, we hypothesize

that neural networks trained with current methodologies all resemble the linear classifier learned on

the same training set. This reference classifier is able to learn approximately the same classification

weights when trained on different subsets of the training set, simply because machine learning algo-

rithms are able to generalize. The stability of the underlying classification weights in turn results in

the stability of adversarial examples.

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To test this hypothesis, we generated adversarial examples on a deep maxout network and classified

these examples using a shallow softmax network and a shallow RBF network. On examples that

were misclassified by the maxout network, the RBF network predicted the maxout network’s class

assignment only 16.0% of the time, while the softmax classifier predict the maxout network’s class

correctly 54.6% of the time. These numbers are largely driven by the differing error rate of the

different models though. If we exclude our attention to cases where both models being compared

make a mistake, then softmax regression predict’s maxout’s class 84.6% of the time, while the RBF

network is able to predict maxout’s class only 54.3% of the time. For comparison, the RBF network

can predict softmax regression’s class 53.6% of the time, so it does have a strong linear component

to its own behavior. Our hypothesis does not explain all of the maxout network’s mistakes or all of

the mistakes that generalize across models, but clearly a significant proportion of them are consistent

with linear behavior being a major cause of cross-model generalization.

9 ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES

We now consider and refute some alternative hypotheses for the existence of adversarial examples.

First, one hypothesis is that generative training could provide more constraint on the training pro-

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Figure 4: By tracing out different values of (cid:15), we can see that adversarial examples occur reliably

for almost any sufficiently large value of (cid:15) provided that we move in the correct direction. Correct

classifications occur only on a thin manifold where x occurs in the data. Most of Rn consists of

adversarial examples and rubbish class examples (see the appendix). This plot was made from a

naively trained maxout network. Left) A plot showing the argument to the softmax layer for each of

the 10 MNIST classes as we vary (cid:15) on a single input example. The correct class is 4. We see that the

unnormalized log probabilities for each class are conspicuously piecewise linear with (cid:15) and that the

wrong classifications are stable across a wide region of (cid:15) values. Moreover, the predictions become

very extreme as we increase (cid:15) enough to move into the regime of rubbish inputs. Right) The inputs

used to generate the curve (upper left = negative (cid:15), lower right = positive (cid:15), yellow boxes indicate

correctly classified inputs).

cess, or cause the model to learn what to distinguish “real” from “fake” data and be confident only

on “real” data. The MP-DBM (Goodfellow et al., 2013a) provides a good model to test this hy-

pothesis. Its inference procedure gets good classification accuracy (an 0.88% error rate) on MNIST.

This inference procedure is differentiable. Other generative models either have non-differentiable

inference procedures, making it harder to compute adversarial examples, or require an additional

non-generative discriminator model to get good classification accuracy on MNIST. In the case of

the MP-DBM, we can be sure that the generative model itself is responding to adversarial exam-

ples, rather than the non-generative classifier model on top. We find that the model is vulnerable

to adversarial examples. With an (cid:15) of 0.25, we find an error rate of 97.5% on adversarial examples

generated from the MNIST test set. It remains possible that some other form of generative training

could confer resistance, but clearly the mere fact of being generative is not alone sufficient.

Another hypothesis about why adversarial examples exist is that individual models have strange

quirks but averaging over many models can cause adversarial examples to wash out. To test this hy-

pothesis, we trained an ensemble of twelve maxout networks on MNIST. Each network was trained

using a different seed for the random number generator used to initialize the weights, generate

dropout masks, and select minibatches of data for stochastic gradient descent. The ensemble gets an

error rate of 91.1% on adversarial examples designed to perturb the entire ensemble with (cid:15) = .25.

If we instead use adversarial examples designed to perturb only one member of the ensemble, the

error rate falls to 87.9%. Ensembling provides only limited resistance to adversarial perturbation.

10 SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

As a summary, this paper has made the following observations:

• Adversarial examples can be explained as a property of high-dimensional dot products.

They are a result of models being too linear, rather than too nonlinear.

• The generalization of adversarial examples across different models can be explained as a

result of adversarial perturbations being highly aligned with the weight vectors of a model,

and different models learning similar functions when trained to perform the same task.

• The direction of perturbation, rather than the specific point in space, matters most. Space is

not full of pockets of adversarial examples that finely tile the reals like the rational numbers.

• Because it is the direction that matters most, adversarial perturbations generalize across

different clean examples.

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15105051015†20001500100050005001000argument to softmax0123456789Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015

• We have introduced a family of fast methods for generating adversarial examples.

• We have demonstrated that adversarial training can result in regularization; even further

regularization than dropout.

• We have run control experiments that failed to reproduce this effect with simpler but less

efficient regularizers including L1 weight decay and adding noise.

• Models that are easy to optimize are easy to perturb.

• Linear models lack the capacity to resist adversarial perturbation; only structures with a

hidden layer (where the universal approximator theorem applies) should be trained to resist

adversarial perturbation.

• RBF networks are resistant to adversarial examples.

• Models trained to model the input distribution are not resistant to adversarial examples.

• Ensembles are not resistant to adversarial examples.

Some further observations concerning rubbish class examples are presented in the appendix:

• Rubbish class examples are ubiquitous and easily generated.

• Shallow linear models are not resistant to rubbish class examples.

• RBF networks are resistant to rubbish class examples.

Gradient-based optimization is the workhorse of modern AI. Using a network that has been designed

to be sufficiently linear–whether it is a ReLU or maxout network, an LSTM, or a sigmoid network

that has been carefully configured not to saturate too much– we are able to fit most problems we care

about, at least on the training set. The existence of adversarial examples suggests that being able to

explain the training data or even being able to correctly label the test data does not imply that our

models truly understand the tasks we have asked them to perform. Instead, their linear responses are

overly confident at points that do not occur in the data distribution, and these confident predictions

are often highly incorrect. This work has shown we can partially correct for this problem by explic-

itly identifying problematic points and correcting the model at each of these points. However, one

may also conclude that the model families we use are intrinsically flawed. Ease of optimization has

come at the cost of models that are easily misled. This motivates the development of optimization

procedures that are able to train models whose behavior is more locally stable.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever for helpful discussions. We would

also like to thank Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Oriol Vinyals for their feedback on drafts of this

article. We would like to thank the developers of Theano(Bergstra et al., 2010; Bastien et al., 2012),

Pylearn2(Goodfellow et al., 2013b), and DistBelief (Dean et al., 2012).

REFERENCES

Bastien, Fr´ed´eric, Lamblin, Pascal, Pascanu, Razvan, Bergstra, James, Goodfellow, Ian J., Bergeron, Arnaud,

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