DARPA Launches Program to Build AI Resiliency Against Adversaries

The Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of its Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception (GARD) program, which is designed to develop new defenses against adversarial attacks on machine learning (ML) models. The program aims to respond to adversarial AI by developing a testbed to characterize different ML defenses and assess their applicability. Researchers on the program have created resources and virtual tools for the community to be able to test and verify the effectiveness of existing and emerging ML defense models. "Other technical communities – like cryptography – have embraced transparency and found that if you are open to letting people take a run at things, the technology will improve," GARD program manager Bruce Draper said in the announcement. "With GARD, we are taking a page from cryptography and are striving to create a community to facilitate the open exchange of ideas, tools, and technologies that can help researchers test and evaluate their ML defenses. Our goal is to raise the bar on existing evaluation efforts, bringing more sophistication and maturation to the field."