arXiv AI

Exposing Vulnerability Monoculture Through Systemic Adversarial Robustness

arXiv AI
Sep 18

Information-Geometric Inverse Distillation for Enhancing Adversarial Transferability

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
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Towards One-for-All Robustness Across a Continuum of Threat Levels

The paper introduces the Threat Conditional Network (TCN), a model that achieves robust performance across a continuous range of adversarial threat levels. TCN splits representation learning into a threat‑invariant backbone and a lightweight threat‑conditional adaptor, using Fourier‑based embeddings and channel‑wise affine modulation to condition on perturbation budgets. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and Tiny‑ImageNet demonstrate that TCN matches or exceeds ensembles of budget‑specialized models while adding only 4.6% more parameters, and it generalizes to unseen budgets and mismatched threat conditions.

By Zhichao Hou, Xiaorui Liu