Unveiling Vulnerabilities in Interpretable Deep Learning Systems with Query-Efficient Black-box Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel query-efficient black-box attack method using microbial genetic algorithms to expose vulnerabilities in Interpretable Deep Learning Systems, demonstrating high success rates and challenging detection.

Contribution

It presents a new microbial genetic algorithm-based attack that requires no prior knowledge, combining transfer and score-based methods to effectively attack IDLSes.

Findings

High attack success rates achieved

Adversarial examples have attribution maps similar to benign samples

Attacks are difficult to detect even by humans

Abstract

Deep learning has been rapidly employed in many applications revolutionizing many industries, but it is known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Such attacks pose a serious threat to deep learning-based systems compromising their integrity, reliability, and trust. Interpretable Deep Learning Systems (IDLSes) are designed to make the system more transparent and explainable, but they are also shown to be susceptible to attacks. In this work, we propose a novel microbial genetic algorithm-based black-box attack against IDLSes that requires no prior knowledge of the target model and its interpretation model. The proposed attack is a query-efficient approach that combines transfer-based and score-based methods, making it a powerful tool to unveil IDLS vulnerabilities. Our experiments of the attack show high attack success rates using adversarial examples with attribution maps that are highly similar to those of benign samples which makes it difficult to detect even by human analysts. Our results highlight the need for improved IDLS security to ensure their practical reliability.