# GLOW: Global Layout Aware Attacks on Object Detection

## TL;DR

GLOW introduces a novel global layout-aware adversarial attack method for object detection that explicitly considers scene context and layout constraints, improving attack success rates across various scenarios.

## Contribution

It is the first approach to generate layout-aware adversarial attacks with explicit semantic and geometric constraints for object detection.

## Key findings

- Achieves about 30% improvement over state-of-the-art in single object attacks.
- Outperforms SOTA by 20% on generic attack requests.
- Excels in zero-query black-box attack scenarios with 20% better performance.

## Abstract

Adversarial attacks aim to perturb images such that a predictor outputs incorrect results. Due to the limited research in structured attacks, imposing consistency checks on natural multi-object scenes is a promising yet practical defense against conventional adversarial attacks. More desired attacks, to this end, should be able to fool defenses with such consistency checks. Therefore, we present the first approach GLOW that copes with various attack requests by generating global layout-aware adversarial attacks, in which both categorical and geometric layout constraints are explicitly established. Specifically, we focus on object detection task and given a victim image, GLOW first localizes victim objects according to target labels. And then it generates multiple attack plans, together with their context-consistency scores. Our proposed GLOW, on the one hand, is capable of handling various types of requests, including single or multiple victim objects, with or without specified victim objects. On the other hand, it produces a consistency score for each attack plan, reflecting the overall contextual consistency that both semantic category and global scene layout are considered. In experiment, we design multiple types of attack requests and validate our ideas on MS COCO and Pascal. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve about 30$\%$ average relative improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods in conventional single object attack request; Moreover, our method outperforms SOTAs significantly on more generic attack requests by about 20$\%$ in average; Finally, our method produces superior performance under challenging zero-query black-box setting, or 20$\%$ better than SOTAs. Our code, model and attack requests would be made available.