Sparse Coding Frontend for Robust Neural Networks

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks are known to be vulnerable to small, adversarially crafted, perturbations. The current most effective defense methods against these adversarial attacks are variants of adversarial training. In this paper, we introduce a radically different defense trained only on clean images: a sparse coding based frontend which significantly attenuates adversarial attacks before they reach the classifier. We evaluate our defense on CIFAR-10 dataset under a wide range of attack types (including Linf , L2, and L1 bounded attacks), demonstrating its promise as a general-purpose approach for defense.