DIFFender: Diffusion-Based Adversarial Defense against Patch Attacks

Adversarial attacks, particularly patch attacks, pose significant threats to the robustness and reliability of deep learning models. Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks is crucial for real-world applications, yet current research in this area is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose DIFFender, a novel defense method that leverages a text-guided diffusion model to defend against adversarial patches. DIFFender includes two main stages: patch localization and patch restoration. In the localization stage, we find and exploit an intriguing property of the diffusion model to precisely identify the locations of adversarial patches. In the restoration stage, we employ the diffusion model to reconstruct the adversarial regions in the images while preserving the integrity of the visual content. Thanks to the former finding, these two stages can be simultaneously guided by a unified diffusion model. Thus, we can utilize the close interaction between them to improve the whole defense performance. Moreover, we propose a few-shot prompt-tuning algorithm to fine-tune the diffusion model, enabling the pre-trained diffusion model to adapt to the defense task easily. We conduct extensive experiments on image classification, face recognition, and further in the physical world, demonstrating that our proposed method exhibits superior robustness under strong adaptive attacks and generalizes well across various scenarios, diverse classifiers, and multiple patch attack methods.