Transferable Adversarial Attacks for Object Detection Using Object-Aware Significant Feature Distortion

Abstract Transferable black-box adversarial attacks against classifiers by disturbing the intermediate-layer features have been extensively studied in recent years. However, these methods have not yet achieved satisfactory performances when directly applied to object detectors. This is largely because the features of detectors are fundamentally different from that of the classifiers. In this study, we propose a simple but effective method to improve the transferability of adversarial examples for object detectors by leveraging the properties of spatial consistency and limited equivariance of object detectors’ features. Specifically, we combine a novel loss function and deliberately designed data augmentation to distort the backbone features of object detectors by suppressing significant features corresponding to objects and amplifying the surrounding vicinal features corresponding to object boundaries. As such the target object and background area on the generated adversarial samples are more likely to be confused by other detectors. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art black-box transferability for untargeted attacks on various models, including one/two-stage, CNN/Transformer-based, and anchor-free/anchor-based detectors.