RED: Robust Environmental Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces RED, a novel approach that redesigns road signs to inherently resist adversarial patch attacks, enhancing autonomous vehicle safety through a fundamentally different robustness strategy.

Contribution

It presents an attacker-agnostic learning scheme for designing robust road signs, shifting focus from model robustness to sign design for improved security.

Findings

Redesigning signs reduces vulnerability to patch attacks.

The approach outperforms existing defense techniques.

Effective in both digital and physical testing environments.

Abstract

The classification of road signs by autonomous systems, especially those reliant on visual inputs, is highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. Traditional approaches to mitigating such vulnerabilities have focused on enhancing the robustness of classification models. In contrast, this paper adopts a fundamentally different strategy aimed at increasing robustness through the redesign of road signs themselves. We propose an attacker-agnostic learning scheme to automatically design road signs that are robust to a wide array of patch-based attacks. Empirical tests conducted in both digital and physical environments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces vulnerability to patch attacks, outperforming existing techniques.