# BOSS: Bidirectional One-Shot Synthesis of Adversarial Examples

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02756 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02756/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [Minimally distorted Adversarial Examples with a Fast Adaptive Boundary Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02044/) (2019)
- [Can AI help in screening Viral and COVID-19 pneumonia?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13145/) (2020)
- [EAD: Elastic-Net Attacks to Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04114/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02328/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Adversarial Robustness: Defense Against Unseen Threat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12655/) (2020)
- [Constructing Unrestricted Adversarial Examples with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07894/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Transformation Networks: Learning to Generate Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09387/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning in Image Classification: A Survey Towards the Defender's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03728/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation with Adversarial Samples Supporting Decision Boundary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05532/) (2018)
- [Enhancing the Robustness of Deep Neural Networks by Boundary Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11029/) (2019)
- [Generating Adversarial Examples With Conditional Generative Adversarial Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07282/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The design of additive imperceptible perturbations to the inputs of deep classifiers to maximize their misclassification rates is a central focus of adversarial machine learning. An alternative approach is to synthesize adversarial examples from scratch using GAN-like structures, albeit with the use of large amounts of training data. By contrast, this paper considers one-shot synthesis of adversarial examples; the inputs are synthesized from scratch to induce arbitrary soft predictions at the output of pre-trained models, while simultaneously maintaining high similarity to specified inputs. To this end, we present a problem that encodes objectives on the distance between the desired and output distributions of the trained model and the similarity between such inputs and the synthesized examples. We prove that the formulated problem is NP-complete. Then, we advance a generative approach to the solution in which the adversarial examples are obtained as the output of a generative network whose parameters are iteratively updated by optimizing surrogate loss functions for the dual-objective. We demonstrate the generality and versatility of the framework and approach proposed through applications to the design of targeted adversarial attacks, generation of decision boundary samples, and synthesis of low confidence classification inputs. The approach is further extended to an ensemble of models with different soft output specifications. The experimental results verify that the targeted and confidence reduction attack methods developed perform on par with state-of-the-art algorithms.