Mitigating adversarial effects through randomization

Convolutional neural networks have demonstrated their powerful ability on various tasks in recent years. However, they are extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples. I.e., clean images, with imperceptible perturbations added, can easily cause convolutional neural networks to fail. In this paper, we propose to utilize randomization to mitigate adversarial effects. Specifically, we use two randomization operations: random resizing, which resizes the input images to a random size, and random padding, which pads zeros around the input images in a random manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed randomization method is very effective at defending against both single-step and iterative attacks. Our method also enjoys the following advantages: 1) no additional training or fine-tuning, 2) very few additional computations, 3) compatible with other adversarial defense methods. By combining the proposed randomization method with an adversarially trained model, it achieves a normalized score of 0.924 (ranked No.2 among 107 defense teams) in the NIPS 2017 adversarial examples defense challenge, which is far better than using adversarial training alone with a normalized score of 0.773 (ranked No.56). The code is public available at https: //github.com/cihangxie/NIPS2017_adv_challenge_defense.