  The attention mechanism has been proven effective on various visual tasks in
recent years. In the semantic segmentation task, the attention mechanism is
applied in various methods, including the case of both Convolution Neural
Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) as backbones. However, we observe
that the attention mechanism is vulnerable to patch-based adversarial attacks.
Through the analysis of the effective receptive field, we attribute it to the
fact that the wide receptive field brought by global attention may lead to the
spread of the adversarial patch. To address this issue, in this paper, we
propose a Robust Attention Mechanism (RAM) to improve the robustness of the
semantic segmentation model, which can notably relieve the vulnerability
against patch-based attacks. Compared to the vallina attention mechanism, RAM
introduces two novel modules called Max Attention Suppression and Random
Attention Dropout, both of which aim to refine the attention matrix and limit
the influence of a single adversarial patch on the semantic segmentation
results of other positions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness
of our RAM to improve the robustness of semantic segmentation models against
various patch-based attack methods under different attack settings.
