OmniPatch: A Universal Adversarial Patch for ViT-CNN Cross-Architecture Transfer in Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation models are vulnerable to transferable adversarial perturbations, yet evaluating transfer attacks on dense prediction models can be computationally expensive. Existing ensemble attacks often rely on multiple surrogate models, increasing the computation cost, even harder for segmentation. This paper studies an efficient single-source alternative for transferable attacks on semantic segmentation. We formulate transferable attack composition as a chained computation over differentiable attack components, allowing the expensive source-model gradient computation to be shared. To reduce the update instability introduced by chained composition, we further use an integrated-gradient-style path-averaged direction as an empirical stabilization heuristic. Experiments on Pascal VOC and Cityscapes evaluate the resulting transferability efficiency trade-off across CNN- and transformer-based segmentation models. IGME achieves competitive transferability compared with single-source baselines and favorable runtime compared with model-ensemble attacks, while requiring access to only one source model.

Despite significant advances in computer vision, semantic segmentation models remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, posing a security risk. These attacks redirect pixels of a chosen victim class to an attacker-specified target class when a trigger is present, while preserving clean predictions. Existing defenses are largely derived from image classification, while dedicated segmentation defenses remain scarce and typically require retraining or model modification. We introduce RePAIR, a post-hoc, label-free, attack-unaware defense based on the observation that backdoor-induced shifts can be stronger in the classifier head than in internal representations, leaving recoverable victim-class semantics. RePAIR infers the victim-target relation from an unlabeled, potentially contaminated image pool, constructs a safety-approved semantic reference, and localizes suspicious pixels by comparing head predictions with internal semantic evidence. It then applies feature-space and output corrections toward the inferred victim semantics, while conservative localization and output constraints limit changes to benign predictions. We model the attack as adversarial probability transport and repair as its approximate reversal, deriving bounds and sufficient conditions for localization, residual attack success, clean-side changes, defense-induced target predictions, and attack-unaware pair identification. Experiments across segmentation architectures and attack settings show that RePAIR substantially reduces attack success while largely preserving clean performance.

Transfer-based adversarial attacks often transfer poorly across heterogeneous architectures because CNNs favor local textures while Vision Transformers (ViTs) rely on global shapes. We propose Season, a spectrum-aware orthogonal gradient refinement framework for L-infinity transfer attacks against black-box target models on ImageNet, using a white-box surrogate. Season decomposes each update into a low-frequency branch capturing structural cues and a high-frequency branch capturing textures. A low-saliency guidance scheme reallocates high-frequency energy to background regions, preserving foreground structures that ViTs depend on. An orthogonal projection then forces the textural update to lie in the orthogonal complement of the structural direction, mitigating feature interference. As a training-free plug-and-play wrapper, Season enhances eight gradient-stabilization and input-enhancement attacks without modifying their cores. Across eight CNN, ViT, and MLP targets, Season improves transfer success rate by 6.6 percentage points on average and up to 16.0 points over strong baselines under a unified protocol.