Properties of Learning Multiplicative Universal Adversarial Perturbations in Image Data

Adversarial attacks in image classification are optimization problems that estimate the minimum perturbation required for a single input image, so the neural network misclassifies it. Universal adversarial perturbations are adversarial attacks that target a whole dataset, estimated by e.g., accumulating the perturbations for each image using standard adversarial attacks. This work treats the universal adversarial perturbation as a problem of transformation estimation. As such, we propose to learn an iterative transformation that maps “clean” images to a “perturbed” domain, by exploiting adversarial attacks. Our experiments show that the proposed formulation leads to easy generation of the adversarial perturbation, while it introduces less noise in the perturbed images, when compared to the state-of-the-art. Finally, this formulation allows us to explore additional properties, notably reversibility of the transformation and attainability of the transformation by using dataset samples.