Explainable Adversarial Attacks on Coarse-to-Fine Classifiers

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for generating explainable adversarial attacks on multi-stage classifiers using Layer-wise Relevance Propagation, improving both attack effectiveness and interpretability.

Contribution

It introduces an instance-based adversarial attack leveraging LRP for multi-stage classifiers, providing explainability and targeting key features across classification stages.

Findings

Effective generation of explainable adversarial perturbations

Enhanced interpretability of model behavior across stages

Successful misclassification induction in multi-stage classifiers

Abstract

Traditional adversarial attacks typically aim to alter the predicted labels of input images by generating perturbations that are imperceptible to the human eye. However, these approaches often lack explainability. Moreover, most existing work on adversarial attacks focuses on single-stage classifiers, but multi-stage classifiers are largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce instance-based adversarial attacks for multi-stage classifiers, leveraging Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which assigns relevance scores to pixels based on their influence on classification outcomes. Our approach generates explainable adversarial perturbations by utilizing LRP to identify and target key features critical for both coarse and fine-grained classifications. Unlike conventional attacks, our method not only induces misclassification but also enhances the interpretability of the model's behavior across classification stages, as demonstrated by experimental results.