Defense without Forgetting: Continual Adversarial Defense with Anisotropic & Isotropic Pseudo Replay

Deep neural networks have demonstrated susceptibility to adversarial attacks. Adversarial defense techniques often focus on one-shot setting to maintain robustness against attack. However, new attacks can emerge in sequences in real-world deployment scenarios. As a result, it is crucial for a defense model to constantly adapt to new attacks, but the adaptation process can lead to catastrophic forgetting of previously defended against attacks. In this paper, we discuss for the first time the concept of continual adversarial defense under a sequence of attacks, and propose a lifelong defense baseline called Anisotropic \& Isotropic Replay (AIR), which offers three advantages: (1) Isotropic replay ensures model consistency in the neighborhood distribution of new data, indirectly aligning the output preference between old and new tasks. (2) Anisotropic replay enables the model to learn a compromise data manifold with fresh mixed semantics for further replay constraints and potential future attacks. (3) A straightforward regularizer mitigates the 'plasticity-stability' trade-off by aligning model output between new and old tasks. Experiment results demonstrate that AIR can approximate or even exceed the empirical performance upper bounds achieved by Joint Training.

Seeing is not Believing: An Identity Hider for Human Vision Privacy Protection

Massive captured face images are stored in the database for the identification of individuals. However, the stored images can be observed intentionally or unintentionally by data managers, which is not at the will of individuals and may cause privacy violations. Existing protection works only slightly change the visual content of the face while maintaining the utility of identification, making it susceptible to the inference of the true identity by human vision. In this paper, we propose an identity hider that enables significant visual content change for human vision while preserving high identifiability for face recognizers. Firstly, the identity hider generates a virtual face with new visual content by manipulating the latent space in StyleGAN2. In particular, the virtual face has the same irrelevant attributes as the original face, e.g., pose and expression. Secondly, the visual content of the virtual face is transferred into the original face and then the background is replaced with the original one. In addition, the identity hider has strong transferability, which ensures an arbitrary face recognizer can achieve satisfactory accuracy. Adequate experiments show that the proposed identity hider achieves excellent performance on privacy protection and identifiability preservation.

Uformer-ICS: A Specialized U-Shaped Transformer for Image Compressive Sensing

Recently, several studies have applied deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image compressive sensing (CS) tasks to improve reconstruction quality. However, convolutional layers generally have a small receptive field; therefore, capturing long-range pixel correlations using CNNs is challenging, which limits their reconstruction performance in image CS tasks. Considering this limitation, we propose a U-shaped transformer for image CS tasks, called the Uformer-ICS. We develop a projection-based transformer block by integrating the prior projection knowledge of CS into the original transformer blocks, and then build a symmetrical reconstruction model using the projection-based transformer blocks and residual convolutional blocks. Compared with previous CNN-based CS methods that can only exploit local image features, the proposed reconstruction model can simultaneously utilize the local features and long-range dependencies of an image, and the prior projection knowledge of the CS theory. Additionally, we design an adaptive sampling model that can adaptively sample image blocks based on block sparsity, which can ensure that the compressed results retain the maximum possible information of the original image under a fixed sampling ratio. The proposed Uformer-ICS is an end-to-end framework that simultaneously learns the sampling and reconstruction processes. Experimental results demonstrate that it achieves significantly better reconstruction performance than existing state-of-the-art deep learning-based CS methods.