DAFAR: Defending against Adversaries by Feedback-Autoencoder Reconstruction

Deep learning has shown impressive performance on challenging perceptual tasks and has been widely used in software to provide intelligent services. However, researchers found deep neural networks vulnerable to adversarial examples. Since then, many methods are proposed to defend against adversaries in inputs, but they are either attack-dependent or shown to be ineffective with new attacks. And most of existing techniques have complicated structures or mechanisms that cause prohibitively high overhead or latency, impractical to apply on real software. We propose DAFAR, a feedback framework that allows deep learning models to detect/purify adversarial examples in high effectiveness and universality, with low area and time overhead. DAFAR has a simple structure, containing a victim model, a plug-in feedback network, and a detector. The key idea is to import the high-level features from the victim model's feature extraction layers into the feedback network to reconstruct the input. This data stream forms a feedback autoencoder. For strong attacks, it transforms the imperceptible attack on the victim model into the obvious reconstruction-error attack on the feedback autoencoder directly, which is much easier to detect; for weak attacks, the reformation process destroys the structure of adversarial examples. Experiments are conducted on MNIST and CIFAR-10 data-sets, showing that DAFAR is effective against popular and arguably most advanced attacks without losing performance on legitimate samples, with high effectiveness and universality across attack methods and parameters.