Tropical Bisectors and Carlini-Wagner Attacks

Pasque et al. showed that using a tropical symmetric metric as an activation function in the last layer can improve the robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) against state-of-the-art attacks, including the Carlini-Wagner attack. This improvement occurs when the attacks are not specifically adapted to the non-differentiability of the tropical layer. Moreover, they showed that the decision boundary of a tropical CNN is defined by tropical bisectors. In this paper, we explore the combinatorics of tropical bisectors and analyze how the tropical embedding layer enhances robustness against Carlini-Wagner attacks. We prove an upper bound on the number of linear segments the decision boundary of a tropical CNN can have. We then propose a refined version of the Carlini-Wagner attack, specifically tailored for the tropical architecture. Computational experiments with MNIST and LeNet5 showcase our attacks improved success rate.

@article{grindstaff2025_2503.22653,
  title={ Tropical Bisectors and Carlini-Wagner Attacks },
  author={ Gillian Grindstaff and Julia Lindberg and Daniela Schkoda and Miruna-Stefana Sorea and Ruriko Yoshida },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.22653},
  year={ 2025 }
}