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.
By Zuobin Xiong, Deval Mukherjee, Homook Cho, Wei Li
The development of federated learning (FL) techniques has helped improve the privacy preservation of users' data and extended the applications of machine learning models. However, the involvement of a...
arXiv:2505. 19840v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved widespread success yet remain prone to adversarial attacks.
By Binyan Xu, Xilin Dai, Di Tang, Kehuan Zhang
arXiv:2609.10002v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deepfake detectors remain vulnerable to transfer-based black-box attacks, in which adversarial examples are generated on a source surrogate model and t...
By Rafael M. Mamede, Pedro C. Neto, Ana F. Sequeira
The paper introduces LI-Boost, a technique that enhances the local invariance of adversarial perturbations to improve their transferability across models. By demonstrating a positive correlation between local invariance and transferability, the authors show that LI-Boost significantly boosts five categories of transfer-based attacks on ImageNet, including CNNs, ViTs, defense mechanisms, commercial APIs, and vision-language models. Extensive experiments confirm the method’s effectiveness across diverse architectures and attack types.
By Bohan Liu, Xiaosen Wang
The paper introduces FAB, an attack that uses meta‑learning to embed dormant adversarial behaviors into large language models (LLMs). These behaviors remain inactive until the model is finetuned by downstream users, at which point the model can exhibit unwanted actions such as unsolicited advertising, jailbreakability, or over‑refusal. FAB is shown to be effective across multiple LLMs and resilient to various finetuning settings.
By Thibaud Gloaguen, Mark Vero, Robin Staab, Martin Vechev
The paper surveys transferable attacks on AI systems, noting that such attacks can be crafted in one setting and then applied to others, thereby lowering costs and increasing security risks. It introduces a unified taxonomy across six axes—cross-instance, cross-domain, cross-modality, cross-model, cross-task, and cross-deployment—while distinguishing source-target changes from attacker resources. The survey also links transfer mechanisms to enhancement methods, highlights inconsistencies and gaps in current research, and proposes a research agenda for better benchmarking and defense strategies.
By Guangjing Wang, Ce Zhou, Yuanda Wang, Bocheng Chen, Hanqing Guo, Qiben Yan
The paper introduces Inverse Knowledge Distillation (IKD), an attack‑agnostic technique that enhances adversarial transferability by maximizing the discrepancy between benign and adversarial prediction distributions on a surrogate model. IKD employs a CE/KL‑equivalent soft‑label objective to push adversarial predictions away from a fixed benign anchor, leveraging Fisher‑sensitive surrogate directions. The authors provide theoretical analysis showing CE and KL induce identical gradients, derive a lower bound on Fisher‑subspace overlap, and demonstrate through extensive ImageNet experiments that IKD consistently improves black‑box attack performance across CNN, ViT, and defended models.
By Wenyuan Wu, Yuan Sun, Yingke Chen, Chao Su, Xi Peng, Dezhong Peng, Xu Wang
The paper investigates the impact of label‑flipping attacks on distributed machine learning, where an adversary can only flip a limited number of training labels. It formalizes the attack as a per‑round constrained optimization problem, derives a greedy label‑selection rule for logistic regression, and shows that this rule is provably optimal under mean aggregation. Experiments demonstrate that optimized label flipping can significantly degrade model accuracy, outperforming random flips, and that the attack transfers to other robust aggregators such as coordinate‑wise median and trimmed mean.
By Abdessamad El-Kabid, El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi
arXiv:2610.07323v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Security evaluation of learning-based systems requires more than just testing the system against a fixed collection of attacks. It requires adaptive me...
By Marsalis Gibson, Claire Tomlin, Shankar Sastry
arXiv:2606. 12075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) heavily utlize Machine Learning (ML) but ML models can be manipulated via adversarial attacks.
By Mayank Raj, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Lance Fiondella, Gokhan Kul
arXiv:2607. 04145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adversarial attacks guide and provide additional training and test data for both adversarial training and adversarial robustness validation, and expose the 'piecewise linearity' of deep learning based models.
By Naman Goyal, Milan Chaudhari