QuSecNets: Quantization-based Defense Mechanism for Securing Deep Neural Network against Adversarial Attacks

Adversarial examples have emerged as a significant threat to machine learning algorithms, especially to the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we propose two quantization-based defense mechanisms, Constant Quantization (CQ) and Trainable Quantization (TQ), to increase the robustness of CNNs against adversarial examples. CQ quantizes input pixel intensities based on a “fixed” number of quantization levels, while in TQ, the quantization levels are “iteratively learned during the training phase”, thereby providing a stronger defense mechanism. We apply the proposed techniques on undefended CNNs against different state-of-the-art adversarial attacks from the open-source Cleverhans library. The experimental results demonstrate 50%–96% and 10%–50% increase in the classification accuracy of the perturbed images generated from the MNIST and the CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, on commonly used CNN (Conv2D(64, 8×8)-Conv2D(128, 6×6)-Conv2D(128, 5×5) - Dense(10) - Softmax()) available in Cleverhans library.