Attack Agnostic Detection of Adversarial Examples via Random Subspace Analysis

Whilst adversarial attack detection has received considerable attention, it remains a fundamentally challenging problem from two perspectives. First, while threat models can be well-defined, attacker strategies may still vary widely within those constraints. Therefore, detection should be considered as an open-set problem, standing in contrast to most current detection approaches. These methods take a closed-set view and train binary detectors, thus biasing detection toward attacks seen during detector training. Second, limited information is available at test time and typically confounded by nuisance factors including the label and underlying content of the image. We address these challenges via a novel strategy based on random subspace analysis. We present a technique that utilizes properties of random projections to characterize the behavior of clean and adversarial examples across a diverse set of subspaces. The self-consistency (or inconsistency) of model activations is leveraged to discern clean from adversarial examples. Performance evaluations demonstrate that our technique (AUC is an element of [0.92, 0.98]) outperforms competing detection strategies (AUC is an element of [0.30, 0.79]), while remaining truly agnostic to the attack strategy (for both targeted/untargeted attacks). It also requires significantly less calibration data (composed only of clean examples) than competing approaches to achieve this performance.