Recent advances in machine learning show that neural models are vulnerable to
minimally perturbed inputs, or adversarial examples. Adversarial algorithms are
optimization problems that minimize the accuracy of ML models by perturbing
inputs, often using a model's loss function to craft such perturbations.
State-of-the-art object detection models are characterized by very large output
manifolds due to the number of possible locations and sizes of objects in an
image. This leads to their outputs being sparse and optimization problems that
use them incur a lot of unnecessary computation.
We propose to use a very limited subset of a model's learned manifold to
compute adversarial examples. Our \textit{Focused Adversarial Attacks} (FA)
algorithm identifies a small subset of sensitive regions to perform
gradient-based adversarial attacks. FA is significantly faster than other
gradient-based attacks when a model's manifold is sparsely activated. Also, its
perturbations are more efficient than other methods under the same perturbation
constraints. We evaluate FA on the COCO 2017 and Pascal VOC 2007 detection
datasets.