arXiv Machine Learning

Adversarial Frontiers: Minimum-Norm Attack Ensembles for Robustness Evaluation

arXiv:2607. 19855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adversarial robustness is commonly evaluated with predefined attack ensembles, such as AutoAttack, at a single perturbation budget $\varepsilon$ and on a selective choice of perturbation norms.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

arXiv:2606. 03344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats.

By Jinghuai Zhang, Yetian He, Kunlin Cai, Han Zhao, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work studies only backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively handle diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

Exploring Sparsity and Smoothness of Arbitrary Lp Norms in Adversarial Attacks

The paper investigates how the choice of the π parameter in λπ norm-constrained adversarial attacks influences the sparsity and smoothness of the perturbations. By applying two established sparsity metrics and introducing three new smoothness measures—including one based on first-order Taylor approximations—the authors perform extensive experiments on real-world image datasets and various neural network architectures. Their results indicate that λρ norms with π values between 1.3 and 1.5 consistently provide the best balance between sparsity and smoothness, challenging the common use of λ1 or λ2 norms.

By Christof Duhme, Florian Eilers, Xiaoyi Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

SEAL: Reinforcing Global Safety in Mixture-of-Experts through Shared Expert ALignment

The paper introduces SEAL, a training-time, parameter‑efficient defense that attaches a plug‑and‑play adapter to the shared expert component of Mixture‑of‑Experts models, and SEAL++, which adds an orthogonal constraint to preserve existing safety subspaces. By leveraging the always‑activated shared expert, SEAL mitigates the structural vulnerability of sparse routing to adversarial manipulation, reducing attack success rates by up to 60% with minimal impact on model capability. The approach is evaluated across six attack scenarios involving harmful prompting, jailbreaks, malicious fine‑tuning, and neuron pruning.

By Qingyu Meng, Yiwei Zha, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks, Herbert Bos, Min Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Fast Preemptive Robustification: High-Frequency Response Anti-Aligns Shared Vulnerability

The paper introduces Fast Preemptive Robustification (FPR), a lightweight defense that enhances the robustness of deep neural networks against transferable adversarial attacks. By sharpening Laplacian responses through a single 3×3 channel‑wise convolution, FPR eliminates the need for surrogate models, iterative optimization, or specialized training. Experiments show that FPR lowers untargeted attack success rates by 12.7% and reduces targeted attack success from 10.7% to 4.1%.

By Jiaming Liang, Chi-Man Pun