Papers › Online Adversarial Attacks

Online Adversarial Attacks

2 Mar 2021ICLR 2022 4arXiv:2103.02014archive 2025-07-28

Andjela Mladenovic, Avishek Joey Bose, Hugo Berard, William L. Hamilton, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Pascal Vincent, Gauthier Gidel

Adversarial attacks expose important vulnerabilities of deep learning models, yet little attention has been paid to settings where data arrives as a stream. In this paper, we formalize the online adversarial attack problem, emphasizing two key elements found in real-world use-cases: attackers must operate under partial knowledge of the target model, and the decisions made by the attacker are irrevocable since they operate on a transient data stream. We first rigorously analyze a deterministic variant of the online threat model by drawing parallels to the well-studied k-secretary problem in theoretical computer science and propose Virtual+, a simple yet practical online algorithm. Our main theoretical result shows Virtual+ yields provably the best competitive ratio over all single-threshold algorithms for k<5 -- extending the previous analysis of the k-secretary problem. We also introduce the \textit{stochastic k-secretary} -- effectively reducing online blackbox transfer attacks to a k-secretary problem under noise -- and prove theoretical bounds on the performance of Virtual+ adapted to this setting. Finally, we complement our theoretical results by conducting experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Imagenet classifiers, revealing the necessity of online algorithms in achieving near-optimal performance and also the rich interplay between attack strategies and online attack selection, enabling simple strategies like FGSM to outperform stronger adversaries.

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