Enhancing Generalization of Universal Adversarial Perturbation through
  Gradient Aggregation
Xuannan Liu Yaoyao Zhong Yuhang Zhang Lixiong Qin Weihong Deng
Deep neural networks are vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbation
(UAP), an instance-agnostic perturbation capable of fooling the target model
for most samples. Compared to instance-specific adversarial examples, UAP is
more challenging as it needs to generalize across various samples and models.
In this paper, we examine the serious dilemma of UAP generation methods from a
generalization perspective -- the gradient vanishing problem using small-batch
stochastic gradient optimization and the local optima problem using large-batch
optimization. To address these problems, we propose a simple and effective
method called Stochastic Gradient Aggregation (SGA), which alleviates the
gradient vanishing and escapes from poor local optima at the same time.
Specifically, SGA employs the small-batch training to perform multiple
iterations of inner pre-search. Then, all the inner gradients are aggregated as
a one-step gradient estimation to enhance the gradient stability and reduce
quantization errors. Extensive experiments on the standard ImageNet dataset
demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the generalization ability
of UAP and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at
https://github.com/liuxuannan/Stochastic-Gradient-Aggregation.