Multi-Label Adversarial Attack With New Measures and Self-Paced Constraint Weighting

An adversarial attack is typically implemented by solving a constrained optimization problem. In top-k adversarial attacks implementation for multi-label learning, the attack failure degree (AFD) and attack cost (AC) of a possible attack are major concerns. According to our experimental and theoretical analysis, existing methods are negatively impacted by the coarse measures for AFD/AC and the indiscriminate treatment for all constraints, particularly when there is no ideal solution. Hence, this study first develops a refined measure based on the Jaccard index appropriate for AFD and AC, distinguishing the failure degrees/costs of two possible attacks better than the existing indicator function-based scheme. Furthermore, we formulate novel optimization problems with the least constraint violation via new measures for AFD and AC, and theoretically demonstrate the effectiveness of weighting slack variables for constraints. Finally, a self-paced weighting strategy is proposed to assign different priorities to various constraints during optimization, resulting in larger attack gains compared to previous indiscriminate schemes. Meanwhile, our method avoids fluctuations during optimization, especially in the presence of highly conflicting constraints. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method across different evaluation metrics.