Improving Adversarial Transferability via Model Alignment
Avery Ma Amir-massoud Farahmand Yangchen Pan Philip Torr Jindong Gu
Neural networks are susceptible to adversarial perturbations that are
transferable across different models. In this paper, we introduce a novel model
alignment technique aimed at improving a given source model's ability in
generating transferable adversarial perturbations. During the alignment
process, the parameters of the source model are fine-tuned to minimize an
alignment loss. This loss measures the divergence in the predictions between
the source model and another, independently trained model, referred to as the
witness model. To understand the effect of model alignment, we conduct a
geometric anlaysis of the resulting changes in the loss landscape. Extensive
experiments on the ImageNet dataset, using a variety of model architectures,
demonstrate that perturbations generated from aligned source models exhibit
significantly higher transferability than those from the original source model.