Revisiting Transferable Adversarial Image Examples: Attack
  Categorization, Evaluation Guidelines, and New Insights
Zhengyu Zhao Hanwei Zhang Renjue Li Ronan Sicre Laurent Amsaleg Michael Backes Qi Li Chao Shen
Transferable adversarial examples raise critical security concerns in
real-world, black-box attack scenarios. However, in this work, we identify two
main problems in common evaluation practices: (1) For attack transferability,
lack of systematic, one-to-one attack comparison and fair hyperparameter
settings. (2) For attack stealthiness, simply no comparisons. To address these
problems, we establish new evaluation guidelines by (1) proposing a novel
attack categorization strategy and conducting systematic and fair
intra-category analyses on transferability, and (2) considering diverse
imperceptibility metrics and finer-grained stealthiness characteristics from
the perspective of attack traceback. To this end, we provide the first
large-scale evaluation of transferable adversarial examples on ImageNet,
involving 23 representative attacks against 9 representative defenses. Our
evaluation leads to a number of new insights, including consensus-challenging
ones: (1) Under a fair attack hyperparameter setting, one early attack method,
DI, actually outperforms all the follow-up methods. (2) A state-of-the-art
defense, DiffPure, actually gives a false sense of (white-box) security since
it is indeed largely bypassed by our (black-box) transferable attacks. (3) Even
when all attacks are bounded by the same $L_p$ norm, they lead to dramatically
different stealthiness performance, which negatively correlates with their
transferability performance. Overall, our work demonstrates that existing
problematic evaluations have indeed caused misleading conclusions and missing
points, and as a result, hindered the assessment of the actual progress in this
field.