Neural Tangent Generalization Attacks

The remarkable performance achieved by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in many applications is followed by the rising concern about data privacy and security. Since DNNs usually require large datasets to train, many practitioners scrape data from external sources such as the Internet. However, an external data owner may not be willing to let this happen, causing legal or ethical issues. In this paper, we study the generalization attacks against DNNs, where an attacker aims to slightly modify training data in order to spoil the training process such that a trained network lacks generalizability. These attacks can be performed by data owners and protect data from unexpected use. However, there is currently no efficient generalization attack against DNNs due to the complexity of a bilevel optimization involved. We propose the Neural Tangent Generalization Attack (NTGA) that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first work enabling clean-label, black-box generalization attack against DNNs. We conduct extensive experiments, and the empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of NTGA. Our code and perturbed datasets are available at: https://github.com/lionelmessi6410/ntga.