{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/morphence-moving-target-defense-against","title":"Morphence: Moving Target Defense Against Adversarial Examples","arxiv_id":"2108.13952","date":"2021-08-31","proceeding":null,"authors":["Abderrahmen Amich","Birhanu Eshete"],"abstract":"Robustness to adversarial examples of machine learning models remains an open topic of research. Attacks often succeed by repeatedly probing a fixed target model with adversarial examples purposely crafted to fool it. In this paper, we introduce Morphence, an approach that shifts the defense landscape by making a model a moving target against adversarial examples. By regularly moving the decision function of a model, Morphence makes it significantly challenging for repeated or correlated attacks to succeed. Morphence deploys a pool of models generated from a base model in a manner that introduces sufficient randomness when it responds to prediction queries. To ensure repeated or correlated attacks fail, the deployed pool of models automatically expires after a query budget is reached and the model pool is seamlessly replaced by a new model pool generated in advance. We evaluate Morphence on two benchmark image classification datasets (MNIST and CIFAR10) against five reference attacks (2 white-box and 3 black-box). In all cases, Morphence consistently outperforms the thus-far effective defense, adversarial training, even in the face of strong white-box attacks, while preserving accuracy on clean data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13952v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.13952v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"morphence-moving-target-defense-against","repo_url":"https://github.com/um-dsp/morphence","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"morphence","method_name":"Morphence"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2108.13952","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}