Adversarial robustness optimization aims to preserve correct prediction under adversarial perturbations, and has produced substantial robustness gains through methods such as adversarial training and adversarial purification. However, we identify a new security risk: these gains can create shared vulnerabilities across defenses. Once one representative robustness-optimized defense is effectively breached, the broader family may become exposed. Studying this risk requires separating genuine transferability from distortion-induced degradation and from the algorithmic gains of sophisticated attacks. We therefore introduce stricter transfer-only protocols and a deliberately simple adaptive attack, PGDTransfer, to test whether robustness-optimized defenses share transfer-only vulnerability under controlled conditions. We further introduce Adversarial Sensitivity Maps (AdvSMs) to visualize and quantify shared alignment beyond differentiable classifiers, including stochastic and non-differentiable defenses. Across adversarially trained classifiers, purification-based defenses, and LVLMs with robust visual encoders, we identify natural transferability within each robustness family, i.e., transfer that arises even with simple PGD-style optimization rather than specialized transferable-attack design. The risk is already severe for purification: PGDTransfer reaches an average transfer attack success rate of $80.4\%$ across filtering-, compression-, and diffusion-based purifiers under $\epsilon=4/255$, suggesting that purifier defenses may no longer provide reliable protection. As attacks improve, currently stronger robustness families may face the same risk. Future defenses should therefore treat vulnerability diversity and transfer-only isolation as security objectives, rather than optimizing only individual robustness.
This paper introduces DefendMal, a novel framework that synergistically combines Denoise Autoencoder with Sequence Squeezing, a Context-aware Adversarial Generator (CAG-AdvGAN), Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversarial training, and a Positive–Negative Detector with Variational Autoencoder (PNDetector-VAE) to enhance robustness against evolving adversarial threats.
Dennis Benedict Crasta, Vikash Kumar· Journal of Computer Virology...· 0 citations
Adversarial training (AT) is a widely adopted defense against adversarial attacks, but its multi-step optimization process for generating adversarial examples leads to substantial computational overhead. To mitigate this, various single-step adversarial training methods have been proposed. However, these models often suffer from catastrophic overfitting under larger perturbations and exhibit degraded robustness. The core issue is that certain single-step adversarial examples, although successfully learned and correctly classified, fail to expose the true vulnerabilities of models. We refer to these misleading examples as “fakers”. Specifically, we find that fakers exhibit three distinct characteristics compared to standard adversarial examples: 1) they unexpectedly degrade the model robustness rather than improve it; 2) they make it harder for the model to learn their robust features; and 3) they show significantly greater divergence from their clean counterparts. These observations motivate us to proactively reduce the impact of fakers during training. To this end, we propose the Faker-Alleviating Single-step adversarial Training method (FAST), a general and effective framework designed to enhance both accuracy and robustness. Concretely, FAST consists of two main components. First, it dynamically adjusts the label-smoothing level for adversarial examples according to their learning difficulty, making fakers easier for the model to learn. Second, it introduces an auxiliary sample with a weak adversarial effect, derived from the single-step adversarial example, which is used to dynamically ease the alignment with clean data and stabilize the optimization process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FAST through extensive experiments, showing that our method achieves superior clean accuracy and robustness against various types of adversarial attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/mesunhlf/FAST.
Lifeng Huang, Yuquan Lin, Chen Wan et al.· IEEE Transactions on Informa...· 0 citations
This work comprehensively investigates computation-efficient strategies to speed up latent adversarial training from two complementary perspectives, and reduces per-step adversarial-training FLOPs by 48.1% while requiring only 0.0118% trainable parameters.
This work proposes Universal Continual Adversarial Defense (UCAD), a universal framework that enables both standard and robust models to perform effective defense under the CAD setting and observes that as the number of encountered attacks increases, UCAD becomes increasingly robust, consistently enhancing the defense capability of existing robust models until saturation.
Qian Wang, Hefei Ling, Yingwei Li et al.· 0 citations
Adversarially robust models often overfit to a specific attack budget, necessitating multiple specialized models for diverse and dynamic adversarial environments, a strategy that becomes fundamentally intractable as the threat space grows. This raises an open challenge: can we achieve strong robustness across a continuum of threat levels within a single model? We propose the Threat Conditional Network (TCN), grounded in a representation factorization framework that decomposes representation learning into a threat-invariant shared backbone and a lightweight threat-conditional adaptor. TCN conditions a single model on the perturbation level via Fourier-based embeddings and channel-wise affine modulation, and is trained against a distribution over perturbation budgets, enabling flexible and seamless adaptation across an infinite continuum of threat levels during inference. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet show that TCN matches or surpasses a full ensemble of budget-specialized models with a single set of parameters, generalizes to unseen perturbation budgets, and transfers robustly under mismatched threat conditions, with only 4.6\% parameter overhead. These contributions chart a promising path toward adaptive and generalizable robustness in dynamic and diverse threat environments.
A detailed overview of the security risks associated with adversarial attacks is offered, including evasion attacks carried out at inference time, data poisoning that corrupts the training process, backdoor insertion that hides dormant triggers inside a model, and model inversion that leaks private information back out of a trained system.
Harsh Verma· International Journal of Sci...· 0 citations
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