Adversarial examples are perturbed inputs designed to fool machine learning
models. Most recent works on adversarial examples for image classification
focus on directly modifying pixels with minor perturbations. A common
requirement in all these works is that the malicious perturbations should be
small enough (measured by an L_p norm for some p) so that they are
imperceptible to humans. However, small perturbations can be unnecessarily
restrictive and limit the diversity of adversarial examples generated. Further,
an L_p norm based distance metric ignores important structure patterns hidden
in images that are important to human perception. Consequently, even the minor
perturbation introduced in recent works often makes the adversarial examples
less natural to humans. More importantly, they often do not transfer well and
are therefore less effective when attacking black-box models especially for
those protected by a defense mechanism. In this paper, we propose a
structure-preserving transformation (SPT) for generating natural and diverse
adversarial examples with extremely high transferability. The key idea of our
approach is to allow perceptible deviation in adversarial examples while
keeping structure patterns that are central to a human classifier. Empirical
results on the MNIST and the fashion-MNIST datasets show that adversarial
examples generated by our approach can easily bypass strong adversarial
training. Further, they transfer well to other target models with no loss or
little loss of successful attack rate.