A note on hyperparameters in black-box adversarial examples

Abstract: Since Biggio et al. (2013) and Szegedy et al. (2013) first drew attention to adversarial examples, there has been a flood of research into defending and attacking machine learning models. However, almost all proposed attacks assume white-box access to a model. In other words, the attacker is assumed to have perfect knowledge of the models weights and architecture. With this insider knowledge, a white-box attack can leverage gradient information to craft adversarial examples. Black-box attacks assume no knowledge of the model weights or architecture. These attacks craft adversarial examples using information only contained in the logits or hard classification label. Here, we assume the attacker can use the logits in order to find an adversarial example. Empirically, we show that 2-sided stochastic gradient estimation techniques are not sensitive to scaling parameters, and can be used to mount powerful black-box attacks requiring relatively few model queries.