Sample Efficient Detection and Classification of Adversarial Attacks via Self-Supervised Embeddings

TL;DR

This paper introduces SimCat, a self-supervised embedding-based method for efficiently detecting and classifying various adversarial attacks and data poisonings in deep models, demonstrating high accuracy with minimal data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, simple linear classifier approach using SimCLR embeddings for broad and efficient adversarial attack detection and classification, including unseen threat models.

Findings

Over 85% detection accuracy on SVHN with minimal data

Classifies 8 attack types on ImageNet with over 40% accuracy

Halves poisoning success rate on STL10 with limited poisons

Abstract

Adversarial robustness of deep models is pivotal in ensuring safe deployment in real world settings, but most modern defenses have narrow scope and expensive costs. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised method to detect adversarial attacks and classify them to their respective threat models, based on a linear model operating on the embeddings from a pre-trained self-supervised encoder. We use a SimCLR encoder in our experiments, since we show the SimCLR embedding distance is a good proxy for human perceptibility, enabling it to encapsulate many threat models at once. We call our method SimCat since it uses SimCLR encoder to catch and categorize various types of adversarial attacks, including L_p and non-L_p evasion attacks, as well as data poisonings. The simple nature of a linear classifier makes our method efficient in both time and sample complexity. For example, on SVHN, using only five pairs of clean and adversarial examples computed with a PGD-L_inf attack, SimCat's detection accuracy is over 85%. Moreover, on ImageNet, using only 25 examples from each threat model, SimCat can classify eight different attack types such as PGD-L_2, PGD-L_inf, CW-L_2, PPGD, LPA, StAdv, ReColor, and JPEG-L_inf, with over 40% accuracy. On STL10 data, we apply SimCat as a defense against poisoning attacks, such as BP, CP, FC, CLBD, HTBD, halving the success rate while using only twenty total poisons for training. We find that the detectors generalize well to unseen threat models. Lastly, we investigate the performance of our detection method under adaptive attacks and further boost its robustness against such attacks via adversarial training.