EvoBA: An Evolution Strategy as a Strong Baseline forBlack-Box Adversarial Attacks
Recent work has shown how easily white-box adversarial attacks can be applied to state-of-the-art image classifiers. However, real-life scenarios resemble more the black-box adversarial conditions, lacking transparency and usually imposing natural, hard constraints on the query budget. We propose $\textbf{EvoBA}$, a black-box adversarial attack based on a surprisingly simple evolutionary search strategy. $\textbf{EvoBA}$ is query-efficient, minimizes $L_0$ adversarial perturbations, and does not require any form of training. $\textbf{EvoBA}$ shows efficiency and efficacy through results that are in line with much more complex state-of-the-art black-box attacks such as $\textbf{AutoZOOM}$. It is more query-efficient than $\textbf{SimBA}$, a simple and powerful baseline black-box attack, and has a similar level of complexity. Therefore, we propose it both as a new strong baseline for black-box adversarial attacks and as a fast and general tool for gaining empirical insight into how robust image classifiers are with respect to $L_0$ adversarial perturbations. There exist fast and reliable $L_2$ black-box attacks, such as $\textbf{SimBA}$, and $L_{\infty}$ black-box attacks, such as $\textbf{DeepSearch}$. We propose $\textbf{EvoBA}$ as a query-efficient $L_0$ black-box adversarial attack which, together with the aforementioned methods, can serve as a generic tool to assess the empirical robustness of image classifiers. The main advantages of such methods are that they run fast, are query-efficient, and can easily be integrated in image classifiers development pipelines. While our attack minimises the $L_0$ adversarial perturbation, we also report $L_2$, and notice that we compare favorably to the state-of-the-art $L_2$ black-box attack, $\textbf{AutoZOOM}$, and of the $L_2$ strong baseline, $\textbf{SimBA}$.
Code (1)
Tasks
Adversarial AttackSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Evolutionary Multi-Armed Bandits with Genetic Thompson Sampling
As two popular schools of machine learning, online learning and evolutionary computations have become two important driving forces behind real-world decision making engines for applications in biomedicine, economics, and…
Decision MakingEvolutionary AlgorithmsMulti-Armed BanditsSequential Decision Making+1Breaking the Impasse: Dual-Scale Evolutionary Policy Training for Social Language Agents
While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for closed-ended tasks, extending it to open-ended social language games via self-play reveals a critical issue: evolution impasse. Due to …
Reinforcement LearningModel Merging to Evolution: Parameter Space Exploration for Expert Models
Model merging integrates the capabilities of multiple expert models to create strong models for multiple tasks without additional training, thereby reducing computational resource requirements. However, existing methods …
AutoRISE: Agent-Driven Strategy Evolution for Red-Teaming Large Language Models
Automated red-teaming methods for large language models typically optimize attack prompts within a fixed, human-designed strategy, leaving the attack strategy itself unchanged. We instead optimize the strategy. We propos…
CASTER: Breaking the Cost-Performance Barrier in Multi-Agent Orchestration via Context-Aware Strategy for Task Efficient Routing
Graph-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) enable complex cyclic workflows but suffer from inefficient static model allocation, where deploying strong models uniformly wastes computation on trivial sub-tasks. We propose CASTE…