Attention, Please! Adversarial Defense via Activation Rectification and Preservation

Understand

This study provides a new understanding of the adversarial attack problem by examining the correlation between adversarial attack and visual attention change.

• In particular, we observed that: (1) images with incomplete attention regions are more vulnerable to adversarial attacks; and (2) successful adversarial attacks lead to deviated and scattered attention map.
• Accordingly, an attention-based adversarial defense framework is designed to simultaneously rectify the attention map for prediction and preserve the attention area between adversarial and original images.
• The problem of adding iteratively attacked samples is also discussed in the context of visual attention change.