# The art of defense: letting networks fool the attacker

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Fast is better than free: Revisiting adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03994/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08864/) (2017)
- [On Adaptive Attacks to Adversarial Example Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08347/) (2020)
- [Countering Adversarial Images using Input Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00117/) (2017)
- [Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11486/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Adversarial Effects Through Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01991/) (2017)
- [Defense-GAN: Protecting Classifiers Against Adversarial Attacks Using Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06605/) (2018)
- [Characterizing Adversarial Subspaces Using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02613/) (2018)
- [PixelDefend: Leveraging Generative Models to Understand and Defend against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10766/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Robust Structured Declarative Classifiers for 3D Point Clouds: Defending Adversarial Attacks with Implicit Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15245/) (2022)
- [SAAM: Stealthy Adversarial Attack on Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03108/) (2023)
- [UniShield: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Unified Forgery Image Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03161/) (2025)
- [A Random Ensemble of Encrypted Vision Transformers for Adversarially Robust Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07183/) (2024)
- [Robust 3D Point Clouds Classification based on Declarative Defenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09691/) (2024)
- [KNN-Defense: Defense against 3D Adversarial Point Clouds using Nearest-Neighbor Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06906/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust environment perception is critical for autonomous cars, and adversarial defenses are the most effective and widely studied ways to improve the robustness of environment perception. However, all of previous defense methods decrease the natural accuracy, and the nature of the DNNs itself has been overlooked. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel adversarial defense for 3D point cloud classifier that makes full use of the nature of the DNNs. Due to the disorder of point cloud, all point cloud classifiers have the property of permutation invariant to the input point cloud. Based on this nature, we design invariant transformations defense (IT-Defense). We show that, even after accounting for obfuscated gradients, our IT-Defense is a resilient defense against state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D attacks. Moreover, IT-Defense do not hurt clean accuracy compared to previous SOTA 3D defenses. Our code is available at: footnotesizeurlhttps://github.com/cuge1995/IT-Defense.