Enabling Heterogeneous Adversarial Transferability via Feature Permutation Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wu, Tao, Luo, Tie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wu, Tao
Luo, Tie
author_facet Wu, Tao
Luo, Tie
contents Adversarial attacks in black-box settings are highly practical, with transfer-based attacks being the most effective at generating adversarial examples (AEs) that transfer from surrogate models to unseen target models. However, their performance significantly degrades when transferring across heterogeneous architectures -- such as CNNs, MLPs, and Vision Transformers (ViTs) -- due to fundamental architectural differences. To address this, we propose Feature Permutation Attack (FPA), a zero-FLOP, parameter-free method that enhances adversarial transferability across diverse architectures. FPA introduces a novel feature permutation (FP) operation, which rearranges pixel values in selected feature maps to simulate long-range dependencies, effectively making CNNs behave more like ViTs and MLPs. This enhances feature diversity and improves transferability both across heterogeneous architectures and within homogeneous CNNs. Extensive evaluations on 14 state-of-the-art architectures show that FPA achieves maximum absolute gains in attack success rates of 7.68% on CNNs, 14.57% on ViTs, and 14.48% on MLPs, outperforming existing black-box attacks. Additionally, FPA is highly generalizable and can seamlessly integrate with other transfer-based attacks to further boost their performance. Our findings establish FPA as a robust, efficient, and computationally lightweight strategy for enhancing adversarial transferability across heterogeneous architectures.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enabling Heterogeneous Adversarial Transferability via Feature Permutation Attacks
Wu, Tao
Luo, Tie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Adversarial attacks in black-box settings are highly practical, with transfer-based attacks being the most effective at generating adversarial examples (AEs) that transfer from surrogate models to unseen target models. However, their performance significantly degrades when transferring across heterogeneous architectures -- such as CNNs, MLPs, and Vision Transformers (ViTs) -- due to fundamental architectural differences. To address this, we propose Feature Permutation Attack (FPA), a zero-FLOP, parameter-free method that enhances adversarial transferability across diverse architectures. FPA introduces a novel feature permutation (FP) operation, which rearranges pixel values in selected feature maps to simulate long-range dependencies, effectively making CNNs behave more like ViTs and MLPs. This enhances feature diversity and improves transferability both across heterogeneous architectures and within homogeneous CNNs. Extensive evaluations on 14 state-of-the-art architectures show that FPA achieves maximum absolute gains in attack success rates of 7.68% on CNNs, 14.57% on ViTs, and 14.48% on MLPs, outperforming existing black-box attacks. Additionally, FPA is highly generalizable and can seamlessly integrate with other transfer-based attacks to further boost their performance. Our findings establish FPA as a robust, efficient, and computationally lightweight strategy for enhancing adversarial transferability across heterogeneous architectures.
title Enabling Heterogeneous Adversarial Transferability via Feature Permutation Attacks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20310