Cited by 29Adversarial Robustness in Machine LearningDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningSecurity and Verification in Computing

Two Sides of the Same Coin: White-box and Black-box Attacks for Transfer Learning

Open access
Zhang, Yinghua, Song, Yangqiu, Liang, Jian, Bai, Kun, Yang, Qiang·2020·Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining

Abstract

Transfer learning has become a common practice for training deep learning models with limited labeled data in a target domain. On the other hand, deep models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Though transfer learning has been widely applied, its effect on model robustness is unclear. To figure out this problem, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations to show that fine-tuning effectively enhances model robustness under white-box FGSM attacks. We also propose a black-box attack method for transfer learning models which attacks the target model with the adversarial examples produced by its source model. To systematically measure the effect of both white-box and black-box attacks, we propose a new metric to evaluate how transferable are the adversarial examples produced by a source model to a target model. Empirical results show that the adversarial examples are more transferable when fine-tuning is used than they are when the two networks are trained independently.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3394486.3403349

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet

References 33 · Cited by 29

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [1][1] Pin-Yu Chen, Huan Zhang, Yash Sharma, Jinfeng Yi, and Cho-Jui Hsieh. 2017. Zoo: Zeroth order optimization based black-box attacks to deep neural networks without training substitute models. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security . 15-26. -
  2. [13][13] Aleksander Madry, Aleksandar Makelov, Ludwig Schmidt, Dimitris Tsipras, and Adrian Vladu. 2018. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. (2018). https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJzIBfZAb -

Authors
Zhang, Y., Song, Y., Liang, J., Bai, K., & Yang, Q.
Affiliations
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK)
  • Tencent (China) (CN)
Venue
Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
Publisher
ACM
Published
2020-08-20
Pages
2989-2997
OpenAlex
W3080797848
Cited by
29
References
33
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 2
FWCI
1.34
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Research Impact Fund (R6020-19)
  • national project (2018AAA0101100)
  • General Research Fund (16244616, 16209715)
  • Early Career Scheme (26206717)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Security and Verification in Computing
Keywords
transfer learning, adversarial attacks, model robustness, fine-tuning, FGSM, black-box attacks, adversarial example transferability, limited labeled data

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review