Recent study of adversarial attacks has revealed the vulnerability of modern
deep learning models. That is, subtly crafted perturbations of the input can
make a trained network with high accuracy produce arbitrary incorrect
predictions, while maintain imperceptible to human vision system. In this
paper, we introduce Block Switching (BS), a defense strategy against
adversarial attacks based on stochasticity. BS replaces a block of model layers
with multiple parallel channels, and the active channel is randomly assigned in
the run time hence unpredictable to the adversary. We show empirically that BS
leads to a more dispersed input gradient distribution and superior defense
effectiveness compared with other stochastic defenses such as stochastic
activation pruning (SAP). Compared to other defenses, BS is also characterized
by the following features: (i) BS causes less test accuracy drop; (ii) BS is
attack-independent and (iii) BS is compatible with other defenses and can be
used jointly with others.Comment: Accepted by AdvML19: Workshop on Adversarial Learning Methods for
Machine Learning and Data Mining at KDD, Anchorage, Alaska, USA, August 5th,
2019, 5 page