PatchCleanser: Certifiably Robust Defense against Adversarial Patches for Any Image Classifier

Authors: 

Chong Xiang, Saeed Mahloujifar, and Prateek Mittal, Princeton University

Abstract: 

The adversarial patch attack against image classification models aims to inject adversarially crafted pixels within a restricted image region (i.e., a patch) for inducing model misclassification. This attack can be realized in the physical world by printing and attaching the patch to the victim object; thus, it imposes a real-world threat to computer vision systems. To counter this threat, we design PatchCleanser as a certifiably robust defense against adversarial patches. In PatchCleanser, we perform two rounds of pixel masking on the input image to neutralize the effect of the adversarial patch. This image-space operation makes PatchCleanser compatible with any state-of-the-art image classifier for achieving high accuracy. Furthermore, we can prove that PatchCleanser will always predict the correct class labels on certain images against any adaptive white-box attacker within our threat model, achieving certified robustness. We extensively evaluate PatchCleanser on the ImageNet, ImageNette, and CIFAR-10 datasets and demonstrate that our defense achieves similar clean accuracy as state-of-the-art classification models and also significantly improves certified robustness from prior works. Remarkably, PatchCleanser achieves 83.9% top-1 clean accuracy and 62.1% top-1 certified robust accuracy against a 2%-pixel square patch anywhere on the image for the 1000-class ImageNet dataset.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {279910,
author = {Chong Xiang and Saeed Mahloujifar and Prateek Mittal},
title = {{PatchCleanser}: Certifiably Robust Defense against Adversarial Patches for Any Image Classifier},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {2065--2082},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/xiang},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video