When Should You Defend Your Classifier -- A Game-theoretical Analysis of Countermeasures against Adversarial Examples

Abstract: Adversarial machine learning, i.e., increasing the robustness of machine learning algorithms against so-called adversarial examples, is now an established field. Yet, newly proposed methods are evaluated and compared under unrealistic scenarios where costs for adversary and defender are not considered and either all samples or no samples are adversarially perturbed. We scrutinize these assumptions and propose the advanced adversarial classification game, which incorporates all relevant parameters of an adversary and a defender. Especially, we take into account economic factors on both sides and the fact that all so far proposed countermeasures against adversarial examples reduce accuracy on benign samples. Analyzing the scenario in detail, where both players have two pure strategies, we identify all best responses and conclude that in practical settings, the most influential factor might be the maximum amount of adversarial examples.