Adversarial examples are malicious inputs crafted to cause a model to
misclassify them. Their most common instantiation, "perturbation-based"
adversarial examples introduce changes to the input that leave its true label
unchanged, yet result in a different model prediction. Conversely,
"invariance-based" adversarial examples insert changes to the input that leave
the model's prediction unaffected despite the underlying input's label having
changed.
In this paper, we demonstrate that robustness to perturbation-based
adversarial examples is not only insufficient for general robustness, but
worse, it can also increase vulnerability of the model to invariance-based
adversarial examples. In addition to analytical constructions, we empirically
study vision classifiers with state-of-the-art robustness to perturbation-based
adversaries constrained by an $\ell_p$ norm. We mount attacks that exploit
excessive model invariance in directions relevant to the task, which are able
to find adversarial examples within the $\ell_p$ ball. In fact, we find that
classifiers trained to be $\ell_p$-norm robust are more vulnerable to
invariance-based adversarial examples than their undefended counterparts.
Excessive invariance is not limited to models trained to be robust to
perturbation-based $\ell_p$-norm adversaries. In fact, we argue that the term
adversarial example is used to capture a series of model limitations, some of
which may not have been discovered yet. Accordingly, we call for a set of
precise definitions that taxonomize and address each of these shortcomings in
learning.