arXiv AI

Catastrophic Overfitting, Entropy Gap and Participation Ratio: A Noiseless $l^p$ Norm Solution for Fast Adversarial Training

arXiv:2505. 02360v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adversarial training is a cornerstone of robust deep learning, but fast methods like the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) often suffer from Catastrophic Overfitting (CO), where models become robust to single-step attacks but fail against multi-step variants.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

SORA: Free Second-Order Attacks in Fast Adversarial Training

arXiv:2606. 00738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial Training (AT) is a leading defense against adversarial examples but often suffers from Catastrophic Overfitting (CO) in efficient single-step variants, where robustness to multi-step attacks collapses despite high single-step performance.

By Mazdak Teymourian, Ramtin Moslemi, Farzan Rahmani, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
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
arXiv AI
Sep 24

When Clients Are Orchestrated: Strategic Gradient Manipulation to Defeat Federated Learning Servers with Efficient Defense

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.

By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy