arXiv Machine Learning

Frame the adversary: a structure-aware attack methodology

The paper introduces a new framework for creating frequency‑based adversarial attacks that are grounded in an explicit optimization problem. By defining a perturbation constraint set linked to structured, non‑orthogonal transforms, the authors show that attacks can be generated as weighted σ‒projections onto this set, providing a clear geometric characterization. Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that these attacks are highly effective across both pretrained and robust models, even on unseen architectures.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

arXiv:2505. 03646v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions.

By Chethan Krishnamurthy Ramanaik, Arjun Roy, Tobias Callies, Eirini Ntoutsi
arXiv AI
Jul 9

NonTextual Target Attack

arXiv:2510. 02999v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically optimize adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with predefined target responses.

By Xinzhe Huang, Wenjing Hu, Tianhang Zheng, Kedong Xiu, Hongsheng Hu, Xiaojun Jia, Di Wang, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work studies only backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively handle diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

arXiv:2606. 03344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats.

By Jinghuai Zhang, Yetian He, Kunlin Cai, Han Zhao, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian
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 12

Spectral Masking and Interpolation Attack (SMIA): A Black-box Adversarial Attack against Voice Authentication and Anti-Spoofing Systems

The paper introduces the Spectral Masking and Interpolation Attack (SMIA), a black‑box adversarial technique that subtly alters inaudible frequency regions of AI‑generated audio to fool voice authentication systems and their countermeasures. Experiments show SMIA achieves at least 82% success against combined verification and countermeasure systems, 97.5% against standalone speaker verification, and 100% against countermeasures, revealing a critical security gap. The authors argue that current static defenses are inadequate and call for dynamic, context‑aware defenses that can adapt to evolving threats.

By Kamel Kamel, Hridoy Sankar Dutta, Keshav Sood, Sunil Aryal
arXiv AI
Sep 3

SEAL: Reinforcing Global Safety in Mixture-of-Experts through Shared Expert ALignment

The paper introduces SEAL, a training-time, parameter‑efficient defense that attaches a plug‑and‑play adapter to the shared expert component of Mixture‑of‑Experts models, and SEAL++, which adds an orthogonal constraint to preserve existing safety subspaces. By leveraging the always‑activated shared expert, SEAL mitigates the structural vulnerability of sparse routing to adversarial manipulation, reducing attack success rates by up to 60% with minimal impact on model capability. The approach is evaluated across six attack scenarios involving harmful prompting, jailbreaks, malicious fine‑tuning, and neuron pruning.

By Qingyu Meng, Yiwei Zha, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks, Herbert Bos, Min Chen