The paper investigates Consensus-based Optimization (CBO) as a gradient‑free method for closed‑box adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations fool a classifier without gradient access. It establishes a theoretical link between CBO’s consensus hopping and natural evolution strategies (NES), and relates both to gradient‑based optimization. Experiments demonstrate that CBO can outperform NES and other evolutionary strategies in some scenarios.
arXiv:2608. 13296v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing global optimization benchmark suites are of a moderate size and are based on a small number of analytical functions that date back even to the 1970s.
Existing global optimization benchmark suites are of a moderate size and are based on a small number of analytical functions that date back even to the 1970s. This causes a risk of biasing the development of global optimization methods.
arXiv:2502.07977v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is a cornerstone of modern machine learning. This paper focuses on the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, wherein a...
arXiv:2511. 12265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) remain vulnerable to diverse adversarial perturbations, motivating multi-attack adversarial training (AT) for improved robustness.
The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.
The paper compares distributed adversarial training algorithms—both centralized and decentralized—within multi‑agent learning environments. It introduces a theoretical framework to analyze how efficiently these algorithms escape local minima, a property linked to model flatness and robustness. The study finds that with small perturbation bounds and large batch sizes, decentralized methods (consensus and diffusion) escape local minima faster than centralized ones, but this advantage may diminish as attack strength increases.
arXiv:2607. 14921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models are increasingly adapted in various domains.
arXiv:2608. 06637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust aggregation methods are widely used in federated learning to mitigate the impact of adversarial client behavior.
The paper investigates how adversarial examples transfer between client models in federated learning and explores the relationship between these examples and client data distributions. It proposes a defense strategy based on adversarial training that leverages the transferability of model robustness. Experiments on real-life datasets demonstrate that the new attack and defense methods outperform existing state‑of‑the‑art approaches.
The paper proposes Byrd-NAFL, a Byzantine‑robust federated learning algorithm that incorporates Nesterov’s momentum and resilient aggregation rules. It achieves fast and safe convergence under non‑convex, smooth loss functions with relaxed gradient assumptions, and provides a finite‑time convergence guarantee. Experiments show that Byrd-NAFL outperforms existing methods in convergence speed, accuracy, and resilience to various malicious attacks.
arXiv:2605.25663v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Black-box adversarial attacks that minimize only the ground-truth confidence suffer from class drift: perturbations wander through the featur...
arXiv:2608. 11815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer-based adversarial attacks craft adversarial examples using surrogate models to mislead black-box victim models.