arXiv Machine Learning

Low-Cost Hard-Label Adversarial Attack with Theoretical Foundations

arXiv:2601. 14300v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hard-label black-box attacks, relying solely on top-1 predictions, represent one of the most challenging yet practically threat models.

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 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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Approaching the Harm of Gradient Attacks While Only Flipping Labels

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 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