arXiv Machine Learning

Attack logics, not outputs: Concept-based Property Attacks for Shortcut Elimination in Neural Networks

The paper introduces concept-based property attacks, which target logical inconsistencies in human‑interpretable concepts (e.g., “red ∧ octagonal → stop_sign”) rather than merely flipping final class labels. It formalizes these properties, proves that attacking them reduces the search space compared to class‑level attacks, and implements them using concept‑based explainable AI techniques. Empirical results across vision and code‑processing models show that retraining with these attacks preserves robustness gains while better eliminating semantic biases.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Reinforcement Learning Inspired Black-box Adversarial Attacks for Computer Vision

The paper introduces RIBA, a reinforcement‑learning inspired black‑box adversarial attack that generates perturbations for neural networks with fewer queries than existing methods. RIBA achieves a 25.4% reduction in median queries on ResNet‑18/Cifar10 and a 22.5% reduction on Vit‑B/16/ImageNet, while matching white‑box attack performance on an adversarially trained model.

By Florian Krone, Elena Hoemann, Sven Hallerbach
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Does Reasoning Mitigate Backdoor Attacks? A Neuro-Symbolic Perspective

The paper investigates whether neuro‑symbolic (NeSy) AI models, which combine neural perception with symbolic reasoning, can mitigate backdoor attacks. It presents a systematic evaluation comparing the NeSy framework DeepProbLog to baseline neural networks across eight backdoor settings and four reasoning tasks. Results indicate that NeSy models are generally more robust than pure neural models, but their resilience depends heavily on how strictly the reasoning process is enforced and its alignment with the attack target.

By Marco Antonio Corallo, Andrea Agiollo, Mauro Conti, Alberto Giaretta
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

FSPGD: Rethinking Black-box Attacks on Semantic Segmentation

FSPGD introduces a feature-space black-box attack for semantic segmentation that targets intermediate representations rather than just output logits. The method uses a dual loss: an external loss to disrupt cross-model feature alignment and an internal loss to reduce consistency among same-class instances. Experiments on Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes show that FSPGD outperforms existing logit-level and segmentation-specific attacks across CNN and Transformer backbones, and its adversarial examples improve robustness when used for training.

By Eun-Sol Park, MiSo Park, Yong-Goo Shin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 13

Defending against Adaptive Prompt Injection Attacks via Reasoning-enabled Task Alignment

Indirect prompt injection attacks hijack LLM-based agents by embedding malicious instructions in third-party data that the agent retrieves during task execution. Existing defenses report near-zero attack success rate on static benchmarks, yet recent adaptive evaluations show that these results collapse once the attacker is allowed to optimize against the deployed defense.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Breaking the weakest link to evade vision language models

The paper investigates how Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be fooled by small, human‑imperceptible changes to images. It introduces a gradient‑based attack that targets only the vision encoder, reducing computational cost while still effectively disrupting both untargeted and targeted multimodal alignment. Experiments on open‑source VLMs such as Qwen2.5‑VL, Granite‑Vision, FastVLM, and Phi‑3.5‑Vision demonstrate that these perturbations can significantly alter the models’ textual outputs.

By Ilan Zini, Boussad Addad, Katarzyna Kapusta