Localized Adversarial Training for Increased Accuracy and Robustness in Image Classification

Todays state-of-the-art image classifiers fail to correctly classify carefully manipulated adversarial images. In this work, we develop a new, localized adversarial attack that generates adversarial examples by imperceptibly altering the backgrounds of normal images. We first use this attack to highlight the unnecessary sensitivity of neural networks to changes in the background of an image, then use it as part of a new training technique: localized adversarial training. By including locally adversarial images in the training set, we are able to create a classifier that suffers less loss than a non-adversarially trained counterpart model on both natural and adversarial inputs. The evaluation of our localized adversarial training algorithm on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets shows decreased accuracy loss on natural images, and increased robustness against adversarial inputs.