A Perceptual Distortion Reduction Framework for Adversarial Perturbation Generation

Most of the adversarial attack methods suffer from large perceptual distortions such as visible artifacts, when the attack strength is relatively high. These perceptual distortions contain a certain portion which contributes less to the attack success rate. This portion of distortions, which is induced by unnecessary modifications and lack of proper perceptual distortion constraint, is the target of the proposed framework. In this paper, we propose a perceptual distortion reduction framework to tackle this problem from two perspectives. We guide the perturbation addition process to reduce unnecessary modifications by proposing an activated region transfer attention mask, which intends to transfer the activated regions of the target model from the correct prediction to incorrect ones. Note that an ensemble model is adopted to predict the activated regions of the unseen models in the black-box setting of our framework. Besides, we propose a perceptual distortion constraint and add it into the objective function of adversarial attack to jointly optimize the perceptual distortions and attack success rate. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our framework on several baseline methods.