Manifold Preserving Adversarial Learning

How to generate semantically meaningful and structurally sound adversarial examples? We propose to answer this question by restricting the search for adversaries in the true data manifold. To this end, we introduce a stochastic variational inference method to learn the data manifold, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, without requiring an a-priori form for the data underlying distribution. We then propose a manifold perturbation strategy that ensures the cases we perturb remain in the manifold of the original examples and thereby generate the adversaries. We evaluate our approach on a number of image and text datasets. Our results show the effectiveness of our approach in producing coherent, and realistic-looking adversaries that can evade strong defenses known to be resilient to traditional adversarial attacks.