Adversarial robustness is one of the essential safety criteria for
guaranteeing the reliability of machine learning models. While various
adversarial robustness testing approaches were introduced in the last decade,
we note that most of them are incompatible with non-differentiable models such
as tree ensembles. Since tree ensembles are widely used in industry, this
reveals a crucial gap between adversarial robustness research and practical
applications. This paper proposes a novel whitebox adversarial robustness
testing approach for tree ensemble models. Concretely, the proposed approach
smooths the tree ensembles through temperature controlled sigmoid functions,
which enables gradient descent-based adversarial attacks. By leveraging
sampling and the log-derivative trick, the proposed approach can scale up to
testing tasks that were previously unmanageable. We compare the approach
against both random perturbations and blackbox approaches on multiple public
datasets (and corresponding models). Our results show that the proposed method
can 1) successfully reveal the adversarial vulnerability of tree ensemble
models without causing computational pressure for testing and 2) flexibly
balance the search performance and time complexity to meet various testing
criteria.