Recursive reasoning-based training-time adversarial machine learning

Yizhou Chen, Zhongxiang Dai, Haibin Yu, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low*, Teck Hua Ho

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The training process of a machine learning (ML) model may be subject to adversarial attacks from an attacker who attempts to undermine the test performance of the ML model by perturbing the training minibatches, and thus needs to be protected by a defender. Such a problem setting is referred to as training-time adversarial ML. We formulate it as a two-player game and propose a principled Recursive Reasoning-based Training-Time adversarial ML (R2T2) framework to model this game. R2T2 models the reasoning process between the attacker and the defender and captures their bounded reasoning capabilities (due to bounded computational resources) through the recursive reasoning formalism. In particular, we associate a deeper level of recursive reasoning with the use of a higher-order gradient to derive the attack (defense) strategy, which naturally improves its performance while requiring greater computational resources. Interestingly, our R2T2 framework encompasses a variety of existing adversarial ML methods which correspond to attackers (defenders) with different recursive reasoning capabilities. We show how an R2T2 attacker (defender) can utilize our proposed nested projected gradient descent-based method to approximate the optimal attack (defense) strategy at an arbitrary level of reasoning. R2T2 can empirically achieve state-of-the-art attack and defense performances on benchmark image datasets.

Original languageEnglish
Article number103837
JournalArtificial Intelligence
Volume315
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2023
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V.

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Artificial Intelligence

Keywords

  • Adversarial machine learning
  • Game theory
  • Recursive reasoning

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