Appearance and Structure Aware Robust Deep Visual Graph Matching: Attack, Defense and Beyond

Despite the recent breakthrough of high accuracy deep graph matching (GM) over visual images, the robustness of deep GM models is rarely studied which yet has been revealed an important issue in modern deep nets, ranging from image recognition to graph learning tasks. We first show that an adversarial attack on keypoint localities and the hidden graphs can cause significant accuracy drop to deep GM models. Accordingly, we propose our defense strategy, namely Appearance and Structure Aware Robust Graph Matching (ASAR-GM). Specifically, orthogonal to de facto adversarial training (AT), we devise the Appearance Aware Regularizer (AAR) on those appearance-similar keypoints between graphs that are likely to confuse. Experimental results show that our ASAR-GM achieves better robustness compared to AT. Moreover, our locality attack can serve as a data augmentation technique, which boosts the state-of-the-art GM models even on the clean test dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/RobustMatch.