arXiv AI

Spiking Neural Networks Are Harder to Steal: A Benchmark Study of Model Stealing Attacks

The paper investigates whether spiking neural networks (SNNs) are more resistant to model stealing attacks than conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). By benchmarking four common attacks on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10, the authors find that SNNs consistently yield surrogates with 10%–20% lower agreement and 15%–25% lower adversarial transferability compared to ANNs. The authors attribute this resilience to the spike‑based, time‑dependent dynamics of SNNs, which make their decision boundaries harder for ANN‑based surrogates to approximate.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

ADAGE: Active Defenses Against GNN Extraction

arXiv:2503. 00065v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve high performance in various real-world applications, such as drug discovery, traffic states prediction, and recommendation systems.

By Jing Xu, Franziska Boenisch, Adam Dziedzic
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

MeMark: Membrane-Space Watermarking for Spiking Neural Networks

MeMark introduces a watermarking scheme for Spiking Neural Networks that embeds a multi‑bit identifier directly into the membrane state of selected Leaky Integrate‑and‑Fire neurons, rather than in the output head. The watermark is recoverable by comparing neuron firing thresholds, eliminating the need for a learned decoder. Experiments on various SNN architectures—including a 215.4M‑parameter SpikeGPT checkpoint—show that all 20 independent 64‑bit keys reliably pass verification under a 51/64 rule, remain robust after fine‑tuning, pruning, quantization, and output‑head replacement, and are not recovered by random keys or adaptive attacks within the tested threat model.

By Roberto Ria\~no, Gorka Abad, Stjepan Picek, Aitor Urbieta
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

SoK: Reconstruction Attacks on Synthetic Tabular Data (Insights from Winning the NIST CRC)

arXiv:2606. 08372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic data is increasingly promoted as a privacy-preserving substitute for releasing sensitive tabular records, yet its central adversarial threat ("reconstruction", the recovery of an individual's hidden attribute values from a synthetic release and a handful of known quasi-identifiers) has been studied only in scattered, hard-to-compare settings.

By Steven Golob, Sikha Pentyala, Martine De Cock
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