GREAT Score: Global Robustness Evaluation of Adversarial Perturbation using Generative Models

Abstract

Current studies on adversarial robustness mainly focus on aggregating $\textit{local}$ robustness results from a set of data samples to evaluate and rank different models. However, the local statistics may not well represent the true $\textit{global}$ robustness of the underlying unknown data distribution. To address this challenge, this paper makes the first attempt to present a new framework, called GREAT Score, for global robustness evaluation of adversarial perturbation using generative models. Formally, GREAT Score carries the physical meaning of a global statistic capturing a mean certified attack-proof perturbation level over all samples drawn from a generative model. For finite-sample evaluation, we also derive a probabilistic guarantee on the sample complexity and the difference between the sample mean and the true mean. GREAT Score has several advantages: (1) Robustness evaluations using GREAT Score are efficient and scalable to large models, by sparing the need of running adversarial attacks. In particular, we show high correlation and significantly reduced computation cost of GREAT Score when compared to the attack-based model ranking on RobustBench $\cite{croce2021robustbench}$. (2) The use of generative models facilitates the approximation of the unknown data distribution. In our ablation study with different generative adversarial networks (GANs), we observe consistency between global robustness evaluation and the quality of GANs. (3) GREAT Score can be used for remote auditing of privacy-sensitive black-box models, as demonstrated by our robustness evaluation on several online facial recognition services.