Adversarial examples are malicious inputs crafted to induce
misclassification. Commonly studied sensitivity-based adversarial examples
introduce semantically-small changes to an input that result in a different
model prediction. This paper studies a complementary failure mode,
invariance-based adversarial examples, that introduce minimal semantic changes
that modify an input's true label yet preserve the model's prediction. We
demonstrate fundamental tradeoffs between these two types of adversarial
examples.
We show that defenses against sensitivity-based attacks actively harm a
model's accuracy on invariance-based attacks, and that new approaches are
needed to resist both attack types. In particular, we break state-of-the-art
adversarially-trained and certifiably-robust models by generating small
perturbations that the models are (provably) robust to, yet that change an
input's class according to human labelers. Finally, we formally show that the
existence of excessively invariant classifiers arises from the presence of
overly-robust predictive features in standard datasets.