A novel approach to generating high-resolution adversarial examples

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have improved expressive performance in many artificial intelligence (AI) fields in recent years. However, they can easily induce incorrect behavior due to adversarial examples. The state-of-the-art strategies for generating adversarial examples were established as generative adversarial nets (GAN). Due to a large amount of data and the high computational resources required, previous GAN-based work has only generated adversarial examples for small datasets, resulting in a less favorable visualization of the generated images. To address this problem, we propose a feasible approach, which improves on the AdvGAN framework through data augmentation, combined with PCA and KPCA to map the input instance’s main features onto the latent variables. Experimental results indicate that our approach can generate more natural perturbations on high-resolution images while maintaining 96% + of the features of the original input instance. Moreover, we measured 90.30% attack success rates on CIFAR-10 against the target model ResNet152, a small improvement compared to 88.69% for AdvGAN. We applied the same idea to ImageNet and LSUN, and the results showed that it not only achieves a high attack success rate,but can generate strongly semantically adversarial examples with better transferability on prevailing DNNs classification models. We also show that our approach yields competitive results compared to sensitivity analysis-based or optimization-based attacks notable in the literature.