Towards Transferable Adversarial Attacks with Centralized Perturbation

Abstract: Adversarial transferability enables black-box attacks on unknown victim deep neural networks (DNNs), rendering attacks viable in real-world scenarios. Current transferable attacks create adversarial perturbation over the entire image, resulting in excessive noise that overfit the source model. Concentrating perturbation to dominant image regions that are model-agnostic is crucial to improving adversarial efficacy. However, limiting perturbation to local regions in the spatial domain proves inadequate in augmenting transferability. To this end, we propose a transferable adversarial attack with fine-grained perturbation optimization in the frequency domain, creating centralized perturbation. We devise a systematic pipeline to dynamically constrain perturbation optimization to dominant frequency coefficients. The constraint is optimized in parallel at each iteration, ensuring the directional alignment of perturbation optimization with model prediction. Our approach allows us to centralize perturbation towards sample-specific important frequency features, which are shared by DNNs, effectively mitigating source model overfitting. Experiments demonstrate that by dynamically centralizing perturbation on dominating frequency coefficients, crafted adversarial examples exhibit stronger transferability, and allowing them to bypass various defenses.