The paper introduces Manifold Anchored Bilevel Transfer (MABT), a framework that aligns adversarial attack trajectories with the intrinsic data manifold to reduce surrogate-specific overfitting. MABT employs a relaxed manifold-anchoring operator as a semantic rectifier and formulates transfer attack generation as a distributional bilevel optimization problem, learning geometry-aligned initializations that minimize expected transfer risk. A Hessian-free solver with linear-time complexity is developed to efficiently solve the resulting hierarchy, and experiments show improved transferability across 10 attackers, 28 configurations, various victim models, and defense mechanisms.
By Yaohua Liu, Yifan Guo, Jiaxin Gao
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:2509. 23689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model Merging (MM) has proven to be an effective alternative to multi-task learning, where several fine-tuned models are merged, without access to the tasks' training data, into one model that retains performance across different tasks.
By Mauro Conti, Ankit Gangwal, Aaryan Ajay Sharma
arXiv:2602.08136v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are now a core part of modern AI. Recent work proposed several visual jailbreak attacks using single/ holistic...
By Md Rafi Ur Rashid, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Shagufta Mehnaz
arXiv:2607. 28959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial training is one of the most effective defenses against adversarial attacks, yet the computational cost remains prohibitive at modern scales, especially for large language models (LLMs).
By Weiyi He, Yuping Lin, Jiliang Tang, Yue Xing
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
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: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
arXiv:2605.25663v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Black-box adversarial attacks that minimize only the ground-truth confidence suffer from class drift: perturbations wander through the featur...
By Florent Tariolle, Florian Yger
arXiv:2606. 10571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial examples reveal vulnerabilities in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models and provide insights for improving robustness.
By Lijia Yu, Jiuxin Cao, Yuchen Qiang, Changhao Chen, Yifei Huang, Bo Liu
arXiv:2606. 07970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current open-weight large language models (LLMs) are prone to malicious finetuning attacks, which could compromise the safety alignment of LLMs with only a few steps of supervised finetuning (SFT) on poisoned datasets.
By Haoming Wen, Shi Chen, Qingyu Shi, Siyuan Liu, Minrui Luo, Jingzhao Zhang, Tianxing He
arXiv:2606. 03647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately evaluating adversarial robustness is a longstanding challenge.
By Vincent Limbach, Jonas Dornbusch, David L\"udke, Stephan G\"unnemann, Leo Schwinn