We aim at demonstrating the influence of diversity in the ensemble of CNNs on
the detection of black-box adversarial instances and hardening the generation
of white-box adversarial attacks. To this end, we propose an ensemble of
diverse specialized CNNs along with a simple voting mechanism. The diversity in
this ensemble creates a gap between the predictive confidences of adversaries
and those of clean samples, making adversaries detectable. We then analyze how
diversity in such an ensemble of specialists may mitigate the risk of the
black-box and white-box adversarial examples. Using MNIST and CIFAR-10, we
empirically verify the ability of our ensemble to detect a large portion of
well-known black-box adversarial examples, which leads to a significant
reduction in the risk rate of adversaries, at the expense of a small increase
in the risk rate of clean samples. Moreover, we show that the success rate of
generating white-box attacks by our ensemble is remarkably decreased compared
to a vanilla CNN and an ensemble of vanilla CNNs, highlighting the beneficial
role of diversity in the ensemble for developing more robust models.