Recently, researchers have started decomposing deep neural network models
according to their semantics or functions. Recent work has shown the
effectiveness of decomposed functional blocks for defending adversarial
attacks, which add small input perturbation to the input image to fool the DNN
models. This work proposes a profiling-based method to decompose the DNN models
to different functional blocks, which lead to the effective path as a new
approach to exploring DNNs' internal organization. Specifically, the per-image
effective path can be aggregated to the class-level effective path, through
which we observe that adversarial images activate effective path different from
normal images. We propose an effective path similarity-based method to detect
adversarial images with an interpretable model, which achieve better accuracy
and broader applicability than the state-of-the-art technique.