Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Examples with the Adam Optimizer

Convolutional neural networks have outperformed humans in image recognition tasks, but they remain vulnerable to attacks from adversarial examples. Since these data are produced by adding imperceptible noise to normal images, their existence poses potential security threats to deep learning systems. Sophisticated adversarial examples with strong attack performance can also be used as a tool to evaluate the robustness of a model. However, the success rate of adversarial attacks remains to be further improved in black-box environments. Therefore, this study combines an improved Adam gradient descent algorithm with the iterative gradient-based attack method. The resulting Adam Iterative Fast Gradient Method is then used to improve the transferability of adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on ImageNet showed that the proposed method offers a higher attack success rate than existing iterative methods. Our best black-box attack achieved a success rate of 81.9% on a normally trained network and 38.7% on an adversarially trained network.