Compositional Targeted Multi-Label Universal Perturbations

Generating targeted universal perturbations for multi-label recognition is a combinatorially hard problem that requires exponential time and space complexity. To address the problem, we propose a compositional framework. We show that a simple independence assumption on label-wise universal perturbations naturally leads to an efficient optimization that requires learning affine convex cones spanned by label-wise universal perturbations, significantly reducing the problem complexity to linear time and space. During inference, the framework allows generating universal perturbations for novel combinations of classes in constant time. We demonstrate the scalability of our method on large datasets and target sizes, evaluating its performance on NUS-WIDE, MS-COCO, and OpenImages using state-of-the-art multi-label recognition models. Our results show that our approach outperforms baselines and achieves results comparable to methods with exponential complexity.