Transferable targeted adversarial attack against deep image classifiers has remained an open issue. Depending on the space to optimize the loss, the existing methods can be divided into two categories: (a) feature space attack and (b) output space attack. The feature space attack outperforms output space one by a large margin but at the cost of requiring the training of layer-wise auxiliary classifiers for each corresponding target class together with the greedy search for the optimal layers. In this work, we revisit the method of output space attack and improve it from two perspectives. First, we identify over-fitting as one major factor that hinders transferability, for which we propose to augment the network input and/or feature layers with noise. Second, we propose a new cross-entropy loss with two ends: one for pushing the sample far from the source class, i.e. ground-truth class, and the other for pulling it close to the target class. We demonstrate that simple techniques are sufficient enough for achieving very competitive performance.

Existing works have identified the limitation of top-1 attack success rate (ASR) as a metric to evaluate the attack strength but exclusively investigated it in the white-box setting, while our work extends it to a more practical black-box setting: transferable attack. It is widely reported that stronger I-FGSM transfers worse than simple FGSM, leading to a popular belief that transferability is at odds with the white-box attack strength. Our work challenges this belief with empirical finding that stronger attack actually transfers better for the general top-k ASR indicated by the interest class rank (ICR) after attack. For increasing the attack strength, with an intuitive analysis on the logit gradient from the geometric perspective, we identify that the weakness of the commonly used losses lie in prioritizing the speed to fool the network instead of maximizing its strength. To this end, we propose a new normalized CE loss that guides the logit to be updated in the direction of implicitly maximizing its rank distance from the ground-truth class. Extensive results in various settings have verified that our proposed new loss is simple yet effective for top-k attack. Code is available at: https://bit.ly/3uCiomP

The booming interest in adversarial attacks stems from a misalignment between human vision and a deep neural network (DNN), \ie~a human imperceptible perturbation fools the DNN. Moreover, a single perturbation, often called universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), can be generated to fool the DNN for most images. A similar misalignment phenomenon has also been observed in the deep steganography task, where a decoder network can retrieve a secret image back from a slightly perturbed cover image. We attempt explaining the success of both in a unified manner from the Fourier perspective. We perform task-specific and joint analysis and reveal that (a) frequency is a key factor that influences their performance based on the proposed entropy metric for quantifying the frequency distribution; (b) their success can be attributed to a DNN being highly sensitive to high-frequency content. We also perform feature layer analysis for providing deep insight on model generalization and robustness. Additionally, we propose two new variants of universal perturbations: (1) high-pass UAP (HP-UAP) being less visible to the human eye; (2) Universal Secret Adversarial Perturbation (USAP) that simultaneously achieves attack and hiding.

Universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), i.e. a single perturbation to fool the network for most images, is widely recognized as a more practical attack because the UAP can be generated beforehand and applied directly during the at-tack stage. One intriguing phenomenon regarding untargeted UAP is that most images are misclassified to a dominant label. This phenomenon has been reported in previous works while lacking a justified explanation, for which our work attempts to provide an alternative explanation. For a more practical universal attack, our investigation of untargeted UAP focuses on alleviating the dependence on the original training samples, from removing the need for sample labels to limiting the sample size. Towards strictly data-free untargeted UAP, our work proposes to exploit artificial Jigsaw images as the training samples, demonstrating competitive performance. We further investigate the possibility of exploiting the UAP for a data-free black-box attack which is arguably the most practical yet challenging threat model. We demonstrate that there exists optimization-free repetitive patterns which can successfully attack deep models. Code is available at https://bit.ly/3y0ZTIC.

Despite their overwhelming success on a wide range of applications, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely recognized to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. This intriguing phenomenon led to a competition between adversarial attacks and defense techniques. So far, adversarial training is the most widely used method for defending against adversarial attacks. It has also been extended to defend against universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs). The SOTA universal adversarial training (UAT) method optimizes a single perturbation for all training samples in the mini-batch. In this work, we find that a UAP does not attack all classes equally. Inspired by this observation, we identify it as the source of the model having unbalanced robustness. To this end, we improve the SOTA UAT by proposing to utilize class-wise UAPs during adversarial training. On multiple benchmark datasets, our class-wise UAT leads superior performance for both clean accuracy and adversarial robustness against universal attack.

Taking photos and videos with smartphones has become part of our daily life. However, it is still challenging to capture a brief action at the right time (e.g. jump photos), and video editing (e.g. local slow motion) remains a manual, time-consuming task. To address this problem, we present a motion sensor-based approach that leverages the advanced technical features of modern smartphones to facilitate the capture and editing tasks. Concretely, we simultaneously record the motion sensor data from a smartphone carried by the object of interest, as well as a video from a remote smartphone cam-era. Taking advantage of the motion sensor data, our approach can automatically "snap" the video editing effect to the input video, i.e. apply the effect (e.g. local slow motion) at the right time. The proposed approach is shown to be effective in various applications. Moreover, we implemented it as an app for Android smartphones, running in a fully automatic manner.

The intriguing phenomenon of adversarial examples has attracted significant attention in machine learning and what might be more surprising to the community is the existence of universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), i.e. a single perturbation to fool the target DNN for most images. With the focus on UAP against deep classifiers, this survey summarizes the recent progress on universal adversarial attacks, discussing the challenges from both the attack and defense sides, as well as the reason for the existence of UAP. We aim to extend this work as a dynamic survey that will regularly update its content to follow new works regarding UAP or universal attack in a wide range of domains, such as image, audio, video, text, etc. Relevant updates will be discussed at: https://bit.ly/2SbQlLG. We welcome authors of future works in this field to contact us for including your new findings.

Data hiding is one widely used approach for proving ownership through blind watermarking. Deep learning has been widely used in data hiding, for which inserting an attack simulation layer (ASL) after the watermarked image has been widely recognized as the most effective approach for improving the pipeline robustness against distortions. Despite its wide usage, the gain of enhanced robustness from ASL is usually interpreted through the lens of augmentation, while our work explores this gain from a new perspective by disentangling the forward and backward propagation of such ASL. We find that the main influential component is forward propagation instead of backward propagation. This observation motivates us to use forward ASL to make the pipeline compatible with non-differentiable and/or black-box distortion, such as lossy (JPEG) compression and photoshop effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our simple approach.

The performance of DNNs trained on clean images has been shown to decrease when the test images have common corruptions. In this work, we interpret corruption robustness as a domain shift and propose to rectify batch normalization (BN) statistics for improving model robustness. This is motivated by perceiving the shift from the clean domain to the corruption domain as a style shift that is represented by the BN statistics. We find that simply estimating and adapting the BN statistics on a few (32 for instance) representation samples, without retraining the model, improves the corruption robustness by a large margin on several benchmark datasets with a wide range of model architectures. For example, on ImageNet-C, statistics adaptation improves the top1 accuracy of ResNet50 from 39.2% to 48.7%. Moreover, we find that this technique can further improve state-of-the-art robust models from 58.1% to 63.3%.

Neural networks have been shown effective in deep steganography for hiding a full image in another. However, the reason for its success remains not fully clear. Under the existing cover ($C$) dependent deep hiding (DDH) pipeline, it is challenging to analyze how the secret ($S$) image is encoded since the encoded message cannot be analyzed independently. We propose a novel universal deep hiding (UDH) meta-architecture to disentangle the encoding of $S$ from $C$. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that the success of deep steganography can be attributed to a frequency discrepancy between $C$ and the encoded secret image. Despite $S$ being hidden in a cover-agnostic manner, strikingly, UDH achieves a performance comparable to the existing DDH. Beyond hiding one image, we push the limits of deep steganography. Exploiting its property of being \emph{universal}, we propose universal watermarking as a timely solution to address the concern of the exponentially increasing amount of images/videos. UDH is robust to a pixel intensity shift on the container image, which makes it suitable for challenging application of light field messaging (LFM). This is the first work demonstrating the success of (DNN-based) hiding a full image for watermarking and LFM. Code: \url{https://github.com/ChaoningZhang/Universal-Deep-Hiding}