CANARY: An Adversarial Robustness Evaluation Platform for Deep Learning Models on Image Classification

The vulnerability of deep-learning-based image classification models to erroneous conclusions in the presence of small perturbations crafted by attackers has prompted attention to the question of the models’ robustness level. However, the question of how to comprehensively and fairly measure the adversarial robustness of models with different structures and defenses as well as the performance of different attack methods has never been accurately answered. In this work, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Canary, a platform that aims to answer this question. Canary uses a common scoring framework that includes 4 dimensions with 26 (sub)metrics for evaluation. First, Canary generates and selects valid adversarial examples and collects metrics data through a series of tests. Then it uses a two-way evaluation strategy to guide the data organization and finally integrates all the data to give the scores for model robustness and attack effectiveness. In this process, we use Item Response Theory (IRT) for the first time to ensure that all the metrics can be fairly calculated into a score that can visually measure the capability. In order to fully demonstrate the effectiveness of Canary, we conducted large-scale testing of 15 representative models trained on the ImageNet dataset using 12 white-box attacks and 12 black-box attacks and came up with a series of in-depth and interesting findings. This further illustrates the capabilities and strengths of Canary as a benchmarking platform. Our paper provides an open-source framework for model robustness evaluation, allowing researchers to perform comprehensive and rapid evaluations of models or attack/defense algorithms, thus inspiring further improvements and greatly benefiting future work.