Towards evolving robust neural architectures to defend from adversarial attacks

Neural networks are known to misclassify a class of subtly modified images known as adversarial samples. Recently, numerous defences have been proposed against these adversarial samples; however, none have improved the robustness of neural networks consistently. Here, we propose to use adversarial samples as a function evaluation to explore for robust neural architectures that can resist such attacks. Experiments on existing neural architecture search algorithms from the literature reveal that although accurate, they are not able to find robust architectures. An essential cause for this lies in their confined search space. We were able to evolve an architecture that is intrinsically accurate on adversarial samples by creating a novel neural architecture search. Thus, the results here demonstrate that more robust architectures exist as well as opens up a new range of possibilities for the development and exploration of neural networks using neural architecture search.