Feature space perturbations yield more transferable adversarial examples

Many recent works have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to quasi-imperceptible input perturbations, yet practitioners cannot fully explain this behavior. This work describes a transfer-based blackbox targeted adversarial attack of deep feature space representations that also provides insights into cross-model class representations of deep CNNs. The attack is explicitly designed for transferability and drives feature space representation of a source image at layer L towards the representation of a target image at L. The attack yields highly transferable targeted examples, which outperform competition winning methods by over 30% in targeted attack metrics. We also show the choice of L to generate examples from is important, transferability characteristics are blackbox model agnostic, and indicate that well trained deep models have similar highly-abstract representations.