Self-Gradient Networks

The incredible effectiveness of adversarial attacks on fooling deep neural networks poses a tremendous hurdle in the widespread adoption of deep learning in safety and security-critical domains. While adversarial defense mechanisms have been proposed since the discovery of the adversarial vulnerability issue of deep neural networks, there is a long path to fully understand and address this issue. In this study, we hypothesize that part of the reason for the incredible effectiveness of adversarial attacks is their ability to implicitly tap into and exploit the gradient flow of a deep neural network. This innate ability to exploit gradient flow makes defending against such attacks quite challenging. Motivated by this hypothesis we argue that if a deep neural network architecture can explicitly tap into its own gradient flow during the training, it can boost its defense capability significantly. Inspired by this fact, we introduce the concept of self-gradient networks, a novel deep neural network architecture designed to be more robust against adversarial perturbations. Gradient flow information is leveraged within self-gradient networks to achieve greater perturbation stability beyond what can be achieved in the standard training process. We conduct a theoretical analysis to gain better insights into the behaviour of the proposed self-gradient networks to illustrate the efficacy of leverage this additional gradient flow information. The proposed self-gradient network architecture enables much more efficient and effective adversarial training, leading to faster convergence towards an adversarially robust solution by at least 10X. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of self-gradient networks when compared with state-of-the-art adversarial learning strategies, with 10% improvement on the CIFAR10 dataset under PGD and CW adversarial perturbations.