ILFO: Adversarial Attack on Adaptive Neural Networks

With the increasing number of layers and parameters in neural networks, the energy consumption of neural networks has become a great concern to society, especially to users of handheld or embedded devices. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of neural networks against energy-oriented attacks. Specifically, we propose ILFO (Intermediate Output-Based Loss Function Optimization) attack against a common type of energy-saving neural networks, Adaptive Neural Networks (AdNN). AdNNs save energy consumption by dynamically deactivating part of its model based on the need of the inputs. ILFO leverages intermediate output as a proxy to infer the relation between input and its corresponding energy consumption. ILFO has shown an increase up to 100 % of the FLOPs (floating-point operations per second) reduced by AdNNs with minimum noise added to input images. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to attack the energy consumption of an AdNN.