Forming Adversarial Example Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks With Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNN) are producing groundbreaking results in virtually all academic and commercial domains and will serve as the workhorse of future human-machine teams that will modernize the Department of Defense (DOD). As such, leaders will need to trust and rely on these networks, which makes their security a paramount concern. Considerable research has demonstrated that DNNs remain vulnerable to adversarial examples. While many defense schemes have been proposed to counter the equally many attack vectors, none have been successful at securing a DNN from this vulnerability. Novel attacks expose blind spots unique to a networks defense, indicating the need for a robust and adaptable attack, used to expose these vulnerabilities early in the development phase. We propose a novel reinforcement learning based attack, Adversarial Reinforcement Learning Agent (ARLA), designed to learn the vulnerabilities of a DNN and generate adversarial examples to exploit them. ARLA was able to significantly degrade the accuracy of five CIFAR-10 DNNs, four of which used a state-of-the-art defense. We compared our method to other state-of-the-art attacks and found evidence that ARLA is an adaptive attack, making it a useful tool for testing the reliability of DNNs before they are deployed within the DOD.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2023
Accession Number
AD1212876

Entities

People

  • Matthew D. Akers

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Automata Theory
  • Computer Vision
  • Computers
  • Convolutional Neural Networks
  • Data Curation
  • Data Mining
  • Deep Learning
  • Dimensionality Reduction
  • Feature Extraction
  • Image Recognition
  • Information Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Mesh Networks
  • Network Science
  • Neural Networks
  • Supervised Machine Learning

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Critical Infrastructure Protection in CBRN and WMD Threats.
  • Economics
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks