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1. QuadAttacK: A Quadratic Programming Approach to Learning Ordered Top-K Adversarial Attacks

   Paniagua, Thomas; Grainger, Ryan; Wu, Tianfu (December 2023, 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023))

   The adversarial vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has been wellknown and widely concerned, often under the context of learning top-1 attacks (e.g., fooling a DNN to classify a cat image as dog). This paper shows that the concern is much more serious by learning significantly more aggressive ordered top-K clearbox 1 targeted attacks proposed in [Zhang and Wu, 2020]. We propose a novel and rigorous quadratic programming (QP) method of learning ordered top-K attacks with low computing cost, dubbed as QuadAttacK. Our QuadAttacK directly solves the QP to satisfy the attack constraint in the feature embedding space (i.e., the input space to the final linear classifier), which thus exploits the semantics of the feature embedding space (i.e., the principle of class coherence). With the optimized feature embedding vector perturbation, it then computes the adversarial perturbation in the data space via the vanilla one-step back-propagation. In experiments, the proposed QuadAttacK is tested in the ImageNet-1k classification using ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, and Vision Transformers (ViT-B and DEiT-S). It successfully pushes the boundary of successful ordered top-K attacks from K = 10 up to K = 20 at a cheap budget (1 × 60) and further improves attack success rates for K = 5 for all tested models, while retaining the performance for K = 1. 

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2. VQAttack: Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Visual Question Answering via Pre-trained Models

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i7.28499  

   Yin, Ziyi; Ye, Muchao; Zhang, Tianrong; Wang, Jiaqi; Liu, Han; Chen, Jinghui; Wang, Ting; Ma, Fenglong (March 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision and natural language process fields. Although the “pre-training & finetuning” learning paradigm significantly improves the VQA performance, the adversarial robustness of such a learning paradigm has not been explored. In this paper, we delve into a new problem: using a pre-trained multimodal source model to create adversarial image-text pairs and then transferring them to attack the target VQA models. Correspondingly, we propose a novel VQATTACK model, which can iteratively generate both im- age and text perturbations with the designed modules: the large language model (LLM)-enhanced image attack and the cross-modal joint attack module. At each iteration, the LLM-enhanced image attack module first optimizes the latent representation-based loss to generate feature-level image perturbations. Then it incorporates an LLM to further enhance the image perturbations by optimizing the designed masked answer anti-recovery loss. The cross-modal joint attack module will be triggered at a specific iteration, which updates the image and text perturbations sequentially. Notably, the text perturbation updates are based on both the learned gradients in the word embedding space and word synonym-based substitution. Experimental results on two VQA datasets with five validated models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VQATTACK in the transferable attack setting, compared with state-of-the-art baselines. This work revealsa significant blind spot in the “pre-training & fine-tuning” paradigm on VQA tasks. The source code can be found in the link https://github.com/ericyinyzy/VQAttack. 

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3. Robust Universal Adversarial Perturbations

   Xu, Changming; Singh, Gagandeep (July 2024, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML))

   Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs) are imperceptible, image-agnostic vectors that cause deep neural networks (DNNs) to misclassify inputs with high probability. In practical attack scenarios, adversarial perturbations may undergo transformations such as changes in pixel intensity, scaling, etc. before being added to DNN inputs. Existing methods do not create UAPs robust to these real-world transformations, thereby limiting their applicability in practical attack scenarios. In this work, we introduce and formulate UAPs robust against real-world transformations. We build an iterative algorithm using probabilistic robustness bounds and construct such UAPs robust to transformations generated by composing arbitrary sub-differentiable transformation functions. We perform an extensive evaluation on the popular CIFAR-10 and ILSVRC 2012 datasets measuring our UAPs' robustness under a wide range common, real-world transformations such as rotation, contrast changes, etc. We further show that by using a set of primitive transformations our method can generalize well to unseen transformations such as fog, JPEG compression, etc. Our results show that our method can generate UAPs up to 23% more robust than state-of-the-art baselines. 

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4. Physical Adversarial Attack on Object Detectors

   Chen, Shang-Tse; Cornelius, Cory; Martin, Jason; Chau, Duen Horng (August 2018, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)

   Given the ability to directly manipulate image pixels in the digital input space, an adversary can easily generate imperceptible perturbations to fool a deep neural network image classifier, as demonstrated in prior work. In this work, we tackle the more challenging problem of crafting physical adversarial perturbations to fool image-based object detectors like Faster R-CNN. Attacking an object detector is more difficult than attacking an image classifier, as it needs to mislead the classification results in multiple bounding boxes with different scales. Extending the digital attack to the physical world adds another layer of difficulty, because it requires the perturbation to be robust enough to survive real-world distortions due to different viewing distances and angles, lighting conditions, and camera limitations. In this showcase, we will demonstrate the first robust physical adversarial attack that can fool a state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN object detector. Specifically, we will show various perturbed stop signs that will be consistently mis-detected by an object detector as other target objects. The audience can test in real time the robustness of our adversarially crafted stop signs from different distances and angles. This work is a collaboration between Georgia Tech and Intel Labs and is funded by the Intel Science & Technology Center for Adversary-Resilient Security Analytics at Georgia Tech. 

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5. GSBAK: top-K GEOMETRIC SCORE-BASED BLACKBOX ATTACK

   Reza, Md Farhamdur; Jin, Richeng; Wu, Tianfu; Dai, Huaiyu (May 2025, ICLR 2025)

   Existing score-based adversarial attacks mainly focus on crafting top-1 adversarial examples against classifiers with single-label classification. Their attack success rate and query efficiency are often less than satisfactory, particularly under small perturbation requirements; moreover, the vulnerability of classifiers with multilabel learning is yet to be studied. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive surrogate free score-based attack, named geometric score-based black-box attack (GSBAK), to craft adversarial examples in an aggressive top-K setting for both untargeted and targeted attacks, where the goal is to change the top-K predictions of the target classifier. We introduce novel gradient-based methods to find a good initial boundary point to attack. Our iterative method employs novel gradient estimation techniques, particularly effective in top-K setting, on the decision boundary to effectively exploit the geometry of the decision boundary. Additionally, GSBAK can be used to attack against classifiers with top-K multi-label learning. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet and PASCAL VOC datasets validate the effectiveness of GSBAK in crafting top-K adversarial examples. 

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