Adversarial examples that can fool deep models are mainly crafted by adding small perturbations imperceptible to human eyes. There are various optimization-based methods in the literature to generate adversarial perturbations, most of which are time-consuming. AdvGAN, a method proposed by Xiao~\emph{et al.}~in IJCAI~2018, employs Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate adversarial perturbation with original images as inputs, which is faster than optimization-based methods at inference time. AdvGAN, however, fixes the target classes in the training and we find it difficult to train AdvGAN when it is modified to take original images and target classes as inputs. In this paper, we propose \mbox{Attack-Inspired} GAN (\mbox{AI-GAN}) with a different training strategy to solve this problem. \mbox{AI-GAN} is a two-stage method, in which we use projected gradient descent (PGD) attack to inspire the training of GAN in the first stage and apply standard training of GAN in the second stage. Once trained, the Generator can approximate the conditional distribution of adversarial instances and generate \mbox{imperceptible} adversarial perturbations given different target classes. We conduct experiments and evaluate the performance of \mbox{AI-GAN} on MNIST and \mbox{CIFAR-10}. Compared with AdvGAN, \mbox{AI-GAN} achieves higher attack success rates with similar perturbation magnitudes.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.