Towards more transferable adversarial attack in black-box manner

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lei, Chun Tong, Guo, Zhongliang, Lee, Hon Chung, Duong, Minh Quoc, Lau, Chun Pong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lei, Chun Tong
Guo, Zhongliang
Lee, Hon Chung
Duong, Minh Quoc
Lau, Chun Pong
author_facet Lei, Chun Tong
Guo, Zhongliang
Lee, Hon Chung
Duong, Minh Quoc
Lau, Chun Pong
contents Adversarial attacks have become a well-explored domain, frequently serving as evaluation baselines for model robustness. Among these, black-box attacks based on transferability have received significant attention due to their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. Traditional black-box methods have generally focused on improving the optimization framework (e.g., utilizing momentum in MI-FGSM) to enhance transferability, rather than examining the dependency on surrogate white-box model architectures. Recent state-of-the-art approach DiffPGD has demonstrated enhanced transferability by employing diffusion-based adversarial purification models for adaptive attacks. The inductive bias of diffusion-based adversarial purification aligns naturally with the adversarial attack process, where both involving noise addition, reducing dependency on surrogate white-box model selection. However, the denoising process of diffusion models incurs substantial computational costs through chain rule derivation, manifested in excessive VRAM consumption and extended runtime. This progression prompts us to question whether introducing diffusion models is necessary. We hypothesize that a model sharing similar inductive bias to diffusion-based adversarial purification, combined with an appropriate loss function, could achieve comparable or superior transferability while dramatically reducing computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function coupled with a unique surrogate model to validate our hypothesis. Our approach leverages the score of the time-dependent classifier from classifier-guided diffusion models, effectively incorporating natural data distribution knowledge into the adversarial optimization process. Experimental results demonstrate significantly improved transferability across diverse model architectures while maintaining robustness against diffusion-based defenses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards more transferable adversarial attack in black-box manner
Lei, Chun Tong
Guo, Zhongliang
Lee, Hon Chung
Duong, Minh Quoc
Lau, Chun Pong
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Adversarial attacks have become a well-explored domain, frequently serving as evaluation baselines for model robustness. Among these, black-box attacks based on transferability have received significant attention due to their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. Traditional black-box methods have generally focused on improving the optimization framework (e.g., utilizing momentum in MI-FGSM) to enhance transferability, rather than examining the dependency on surrogate white-box model architectures. Recent state-of-the-art approach DiffPGD has demonstrated enhanced transferability by employing diffusion-based adversarial purification models for adaptive attacks. The inductive bias of diffusion-based adversarial purification aligns naturally with the adversarial attack process, where both involving noise addition, reducing dependency on surrogate white-box model selection. However, the denoising process of diffusion models incurs substantial computational costs through chain rule derivation, manifested in excessive VRAM consumption and extended runtime. This progression prompts us to question whether introducing diffusion models is necessary. We hypothesize that a model sharing similar inductive bias to diffusion-based adversarial purification, combined with an appropriate loss function, could achieve comparable or superior transferability while dramatically reducing computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function coupled with a unique surrogate model to validate our hypothesis. Our approach leverages the score of the time-dependent classifier from classifier-guided diffusion models, effectively incorporating natural data distribution knowledge into the adversarial optimization process. Experimental results demonstrate significantly improved transferability across diverse model architectures while maintaining robustness against diffusion-based defenses.
title Towards more transferable adversarial attack in black-box manner
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18097