On Adaptive Attacks to Adversarial Example Defenses

Abstract

Adaptive attacks have (rightfully) become the de facto standard for evaluating defenses to adversarial examples. We find, however, that typical adaptive evaluations are incomplete. We demonstrate that 13 defenses recently published at ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS---and which illustrate a diverse set of defense strategies---can be circumvented despite attempting to perform evaluations using adaptive attacks.