GLOW: Global Layout Aware Attacks on Object Detection

Adversarial attacks aim to perturb images such that a predictor outputs incorrect results. Due to the limited research in structured attacks, imposing consistency checks on natural multi-object scenes is a practical defense against conventional adversarial attacks. More desired attacks should be able to fool defenses with such consistency checks. Therefore, we present the first approach GLOW that copes with various attack requests by generating global layout-aware adversarial attacks, in which both categorical and geometric layout constraints are explicitly established. Specifically, we focus on object detection tasks and given a victim image, GLOW first localizes victim objects according to target labels. And then it generates multiple attack plans, together with their context-consistency scores. GLOW, on the one hand, is capable of handling various types of requests, including single or multiple victim objects, with or without specified victim objects. On the other hand, it produces a consistency score for each attack plan, reflecting the overall contextual consistency that both semantic category and global scene layout are considered. We conduct our experiments on MS COCO and Pascal. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve about 30% average relative improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods in conventional single object attack request; Moreover, such superiority is also valid across more generic attack requests, under both whitebox and zero-query black-box settings. Finally, we conduct comprehensive human analysis, which not only validates our claim further but also provides strong evidence that our evaluation metrics reflect human reviews well.