# PatchGuard++: Efficient Provable Attack Detection against Adversarial Patches

Source: [PatchGuard++: Efficient Provable Attack Detection against Adversarial Patches](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa69d41e209131cea24734>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:07:38.365Z

Authors: Chong Xiang, Prateek Mittal

Published: 2021-04-26T14:22:33.000Z

## Abstract

An adversarial patch can arbitrarily manipulate image pixels within a restricted region to induce model misclassification. The threat of this localized attack has gained significant attention because the adversary can mount a physically-realizable attack by attaching patches to the victim object. Recent provably robust defenses generally follow the PatchGuard framework by using CNNs with small receptive fields and secure feature aggregation for robust model predictions. In this paper, we extend PatchGuard to PatchGuard++ for provably detecting the adversarial patch attack to boost both provable robust accuracy and clean accuracy. In PatchGuard++, we first use a CNN with small receptive fields for feature extraction so that the number of features corrupted by the adversarial patch is bounded. Next, we apply masks in the feature space and evaluate predictions on all possible masked feature maps. Finally, we extract a pattern from all masked predictions to catch the adversarial patch attack. We evaluate PatchGuard++ on ImageNette (a 10-class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet, and CIFAR-10 and demonstrate that PatchGuard++ significantly improves the provable robustness and clean performance.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12609>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12609.pdf>)
