keyword
adaptive attacks
An adaptive attack is an adversarial attack specifically tailored to circumvent or neutralize a known defense mechanism by incorporating the defense's internal operations and parameters into the attack strategy. Unlike static or generic attacks that target an undefended model or rely on fixed disruption patterns, an adaptive attack assumes the adversary has complete or partial awareness of the defensive measures in place, such as input preprocessing, generative purification, or specialized loss functions. The attacker modifies optimization techniques, gradient computations, or perturbation schemes specifically to bypass these countermeasures, serving as a standard evaluation methodology for measuring the true worst-case security and robustness of machine learning systems.
4 items

Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification
Weili Nie, Brandon Guo, Yujia Huang, Chaowei Xiao, Arash Vahdat, Animashree Anandkumar
Why you should read this
Introduces DiffPure, a defense that removes adversarial perturbations using forward and reverse diffusion processes, outperforming standard adversarial training across multiple architectures while protecting pre-trained classifiers against adaptive attacks.
Adversarial purification refers to a class of defense methods that remove adversarial perturbations using a generative model. These methods do not make assumptions on the form of attack and the classification model, and thus can defend pre-existing classifiers against unseen threats. However, their performance currently falls behind adversarial training methods. In this work, we propose DiffPure that uses diffusion models for adversarial purification: Given an adversarial example, we first diffuse it with a small amount of noise following a forward diffusion process, and then recover the clean image through a reverse generative process. To evaluate our method against strong adaptive attacks in an efficient and scalable way, we propose to use the adjoint method to compute full gradients of the reverse generative process. Extensive experiments on three image datasets including CIFAR-10, ImageNet and CelebA-HQ with three classifier architectures including ResNet, WideResNet and ViT demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results, outperforming current adversarial training and adversarial purification methods, often by a large margin. Project page: this https URL.
Added
2026-10-05

Trading inference-time compute for adversarial robustness
Wojciech Zaremba, Evgenia Nitishinskaya, Boaz Barak, Stephanie Lin, Sam Toyer, Yaodong Yu, Rachel Dias, Eric Wallace, Kai Xiao, Johannes Heidecke, Amelia Glaese
Why you should read this
Demonstrates that scaling inference-time compute in reasoning models substantially reduces their vulnerability to adversarial attacks without requiring adversarial training, while identifying key limitations and new attack vectors specific to reasoning architectures.
We conduct experiments on the impact of increasing inference-time compute in reasoning models (specifically OpenAI o1-preview and o1-mini) on their robustness to adversarial attacks. We find that across a variety of attacks, increased inference-time compute leads to improved robustness. In many cases (with important exceptions), the fraction of model samples where the attack succeeds tends to zero as the amount of test-time compute grows. We perform no adversarial training for the tasks we study, and we increase inference-time compute by simply allowing the models to spend more compute on reasoning, independently of the form of attack. Our results suggest that inference-time compute has the potential to improve adversarial robustness for Large Language Models. We also explore new attacks directed at reasoning models, as well as settings where inference-time compute does not improve reliability, and speculate on the reasons for these as well as ways to address them.
Added
2026-10-05

Image Shortcut Squeezing: Countering Perturbative Availability Poisons with Compression
Zhuoran Liu, Zhengyu Zhao, Martha A. Larson
Why you should read this
Proposes Image Shortcut Squeezing, a simple compression-based defense that neutralizes twelve state-of-the-art perturbative availability poisons by exploiting the frequency characteristics of poison shortcuts, matching or outperforming adversarial training with far greater efficiency.
Perturbative availability poisons (PAPs) add small changes to images to prevent their use for model training. Current research adopts the belief that practical and effective approaches to countering PAPs do not exist. In this paper, we argue that it is time to abandon this belief. We present extensive experiments showing that 12 state-of-the-art PAP methods are vulnerable to Image Shortcut Squeezing (ISS), which is based on simple compression. For example, on average, ISS restores the CIFAR-10 model accuracy to 81.73%, surpassing the previous best preprocessing-based countermeasures by 37.97% absolute. ISS also (slightly) outperforms adversarial training and has higher generalizability to unseen perturbation norms and also higher efficiency. Our investigation reveals that the property of PAP perturbations depends on the type of surrogate model used for poison generation, and it explains why a specific ISS compression yields the best performance for a specific type of PAP perturbation. We further test stronger, adaptive poisoning, and show it falls short of being an ideal defense against ISS. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of considering various (simple) countermeasures to ensure the meaningfulness of analysis carried out during the development of PAP methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/liuzrcc/ImageShortcutSqueezing.
Added
2026-10-03

Defending against Model Stealing via Verifying Embedded External Features
Yiming Li, Linghui Zhu, Xiaojun Jia, Yong Jiang, Shu-Tao Xia, Xiaochun Cao
Why you should read this
Proposes embedding defender-specified external features into training images via style transfer to reliably verify stolen models across multiple types of model stealing attacks without degrading baseline performance.
Obtaining a well-trained model involves expensive data collection and training procedures, therefore the model is a valuable intellectual property. Recent studies revealed that adversaries can ‘steal’ deployed models even when they have no training samples and can not get access to the model parameters or structures. Currently, there were some defense methods to alleviate this threat, mostly by increasing the cost of model stealing. In this paper, we explore the defense from another angle by verifying whether a suspicious model contains the knowledge of defender-specified external features. Specifically, we embed the external features by tempering a few training samples with style transfer. We then train a meta-classifier to determine whether a model is stolen from the victim. This approach is inspired by the understanding that the stolen models should contain the knowledge of features learned by the victim model. We examine our method on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective in detecting different types of model stealing simultaneously, even if the stolen model is obtained via a multi-stage stealing process. The codes for reproducing main results are available at Github (https://github.com/zlh-thu/StealingVerification).
Added
2026-09-26
