A Mask-Based Adversarial Defense Scheme

Adversarial attacks hamper the functionality and accuracy of deep neural networks (DNNs) by meddling with subtle perturbations to their inputs. In this work, we propose a new mask-based adversarial defense scheme (MAD) for DNNs to mitigate the negative effect from adversarial attacks. Our method preprocesses multiple copies of a potential adversarial image by applying random masking, before the outputs of the DNN on all the randomly masked images are combined. As a result, the combined final output becomes more tolerant to minor perturbations on the original input. Compared with existing adversarial defense techniques, our method does not need any additional denoising structure or any change to a DNN’s architectural design. We have tested this approach on a collection of DNN models for a variety of datasets, and the experimental results confirm that the proposed method can effectively improve the defense abilities of the DNNs against all of the tested adversarial attack methods. In certain scenarios, the DNN models trained with MAD can improve classification accuracy by as much as $90\%$ compared to the original models when given adversarial inputs.