We consider universal adversarial patches for faces -- small visual elements
whose addition to a face image reliably destroys the performance of face
detectors. Unlike previous work that mostly focused on the algorithmic design
of adversarial examples in terms of improving the success rate as an attacker,
in this work we show an interpretation of such patches that can prevent the
state-of-the-art face detectors from detecting the real faces. We investigate a
phenomenon: patches designed to suppress real face detection appear face-like.
This phenomenon holds generally across different initialization, locations,
scales of patches, backbones, and state-of-the-art face detection frameworks.
We propose new optimization-based approaches to automatic design of universal
adversarial patches for varying goals of the attack, including scenarios in
which true positives are suppressed without introducing false positives. Our
proposed algorithms perform well on real-world datasets, deceiving
state-of-the-art face detectors in terms of multiple precision/recall metrics
and transferability.