Towards Evaluating Transfer-based Attacks Systematically, Practically, and Fairly

The adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has drawn great attention due to the security risk of applying these models in real-world applications. Based on transferability of adversarial examples, an increasing number of transfer-based methods have been developed to fool black-box DNN models whose architecture and parameters are inaccessible. Although tremendous effort has been exerted, there still lacks a standardized benchmark that could be taken advantage of to compare these methods systematically, fairly, and practically. Our investigation shows that the evaluation of some methods needs to be more reasonable and more thorough to verify their effectiveness, to avoid, for example, unfair comparison and insufficient consideration of possible substitute/victim models. Therefore, we establish a transfer-based attack benchmark (TA-Bench) which implements 30+ methods. In this paper, we evaluate and compare them comprehensively on 25 popular substitute/victim models on ImageNet. New insights about the effectiveness of these methods are gained and guidelines for future evaluations are provided. Code at: https://github.com/qizhangli/TA-Bench . * Yiwen Guo leads the project and serves as the corresponding author. 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023).