QuantAttack: Exploiting Quantization Techniques to Attack Vision Transformers

In recent years, there has been a significant trend in deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly transformer-based models, of developing ever-larger and more capable models. While they demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, their growing scale requires increased computational resources (e.g., GPUs with greater memory capacity). To address this problem, quantization techniques (i.e., low-bit-precision representation and matrix multiplication) have been proposed. Most quantization techniques employ a static strategy in which the model parameters are quantized, either during training or inference, without considering the test-time sample. In contrast, dynamic quantization techniques, which have become increasingly popular, adapt during inference based on the input provided, while maintaining full-precision performance. However, their dynamic behavior and average-case performance assumption makes them vulnerable to a novel threat vector - adversarial attacks that target the model's efficiency and availability. In this paper, we present QuantAttack, a novel attack that targets the availability of quantized vision transformers, slowing down the inference, and increasing memory usage and energy consumption. The source code is available online11https://github.com/barasamit/QuantAttack.