Low Frequency Adversarial Perturbation

Adversarial images aim to change a target model's decision by minimally perturbing a target image. In the black-box setting, the absence of gradient information often renders this search problem costly in terms of query complexity. In this paper we propose to restrict the search for adversarial images to a low frequency domain. This approach is readily compatible with many existing black-box attack frameworks and consistently reduces their query cost by 2 to 4 times. Further, we can circumvent image transformation defenses even when both the model and the defense strategy are unknown. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of this technique by fooling the Google Cloud Vision platform with an unprecedented low number of model queries.