Physical Adversarial Attacks

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Physical adversarial attacks study how changes that can be deployed in the world—such as patches, camouflage, altered lighting, acoustic signals, or LiDAR interference—can mislead vision and robotic systems. Common approaches optimize printable patterns or 3D textures using differentiable rendering, expectation over transformation, and simulation, then test them across viewpoints, lighting, distance, and physical devices. Research spans object detection and tracking, autonomous driving, biometrics, infrared and multimodal perception, and vision-language-action robots; defenses include adversarial training, input recovery, and methods that stabilize model features or attention. A central challenge is that digital success often fails to transfer reliably to physical settings, so evaluation increasingly emphasizes real-world recapture, changing scenes and viewpoints, temporal effects, and the trade-off between attack effectiveness and stealth.

Latest papers

83 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Towards Effective and Transferable Physical Camouflage against Multi-View BEV-based 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving
Oct 23, 2026Linye Lyu, Jiawei Zhou, Daojing He +1Adversarial Attacks Physical Adversarial Attacks
Bridging Digital Deception and Physical Fidelity: A Spatio-Temporal Attack on Cognitive Radars
Oct 20, 2026Tongrun Xing, Yongjun Dai, Xuan Liao +4Adversarial Attacks Physical Adversarial Attacks
College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. · College of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. · College of Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. +1
Across Viewpoints and Time: Trajectory-Generalizable Physical Attacks on World Models and Video Understanding Models
Oct 11, 2026Song Xia, Meiwen Ding, Chenqi Kong +2Adversarial Attacks Physical Adversarial Attacks
Nanyang Technological University · National University of Singapore · Pengcheng Lab
TACTIC: Temporal and Context-Aware LLM Tactical Planning for Roadside LiDAR Attacks
Sep 30, 2026Yiming Gao, Shaocheng LuoAdversarial Attacks Autonomous Driving Perception
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Printability-Constrained Adversarial Decals for Near-Nadir Aerial Perception: Measured Ink Gamuts, Nested Realism Constraints, and a Physical-World Bound
Sep 27, 2026Sandesh Shrestha, K. T. Yasas Mahima, Asanka G. PereraAdversarial Patch Attacks Adversarial Attacks
Industrial Systems Engineering (ISE), Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Pathum Thani 12120, Thailand
Stealthy in Semantics, Antagonistic in Space: Attacking Visible-Infrared Object Detectors via Object-Level Misalignment
Sep 16, 2026Yueqi Zhu, Qi Ming, Guo Cheng +6Physical Adversarial Attacks Adversarial Patch Attacks
Beijing University of Technology · Peking University · National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences +1
Physical Adversarial Examples for Person Detectors in Thermal Images Based on 3D Modeling
Aug 31, 2026Xiaopei Zhu, Siyuan Huang, Zhanhao Hu +3Thermal Imaging Adversarial Patch Attacks
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CIBR), Beijing 100010, China
ARMOR: Manifold-Oriented Training for Adversarially Robust Aerial Object Detection under Data Scarcity
Aug 30, 2026Haoran Wang, Matthew Lau, Alec Helbling +7Adversarial Robustness Adversarial Training
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA · Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Adversarial Calibration Attack on Autonomous Vehicles
Aug 28, 2026Liangkai Liu, Qingzhao Zhang, Kang G. ShinPhysical Adversarial Attacks Camera Calibration
Texas Tech University · University of Arizona · University of Michigan
Phantom Navigator: Stealthy and Precise Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Redirection with Real-Time Tracking and GPS Spoofing
Aug 26, 2026Haocheng Meng, Shaocheng Luo, Songqiao Xie +1Adversarial Attacks UAV Navigation
Duke University Durham, North Carolina, USA
CertVLA: Certified Defense against Physical Visual Attacks for Vision-Language-Action Models
Aug 21, 2026Hui Lu, Zhijie Peng, Yuqi Lin +8Robustness of VLA Models Adversarial Attacks on VLA Models
AdROD: HyperNetwork-based Adversarially Robust Object Detection for Autonomous Driving
Aug 17, 2026Yuting Wu, Dongfang Guo, Xiangzhong Luo +2Adversarial Robustness Object Detection
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
UniTexture: Cross-Task Universal Adversarial Textures for Vision-Language-Action Models
Aug 13, 2026Yukun Dai, Mingzhe Dai, Tianshi Wang +3Adversarial Attacks on VLA Models Vision-Language-Action Models
Tongji University · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Hidden in Plain Sight: Diffusion-Based Unrestricted Robotic Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models
Aug 11, 2026Jiahui Han, Yuhui Yao, Xin Wang +6Adversarial Attacks Adversarial Attacks on VLA Models
1Xi’an Jiaotong University · 2Shanghai AI Laboratory · University of Science and Technology of China
Distilling Vision-Language Models for Robust Traffic Sign Perception in Autonomous Vehicles
Aug 9, 2026Pedram MohajerAnsari, Amir Salarpour, Mert D. PeséAdversarial Robustness VLM Distillation
Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
AdvTiles: Physical Adversarial Camouflage Clothing against Person Detectors via Learnable Tiles
Aug 7, 2026Jinlei Wang, Jiahuan Long, Mingkai Sun +9Adversarial Attacks Adversarial Attacks on Object Detectors
Sun Yat-sen University · 2Chinese Academy of Military Science · 3Shenzhen University +2
ColorFD: A Finite-Difference Guided Black-Box Physical Adversarial Attack for Remote Sensing Object Detection
Aug 5, 2026Tiannuo Guo, Guhang Qiu, Yuzhen Xie +3Remote Sensing Image Understanding Adversarial Patch Attacks
College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China
TwinIR: Coordinated Invisible Dual-Point Attacks on Online HD Map Construction
Aug 5, 2026Haibo Hu, Jianghuai Deng, Chen Tang +3HD Map Construction Adversarial Attacks
City University of Hong Kong
Structure-Aware Robust Fine-Tuning: Defending Vision-Language-Action Robots Against Physical Attention Hijacking
Aug 4, 2026Jinquan Zhang, Dongfu Yin, Run Yang +3Fine-Tuning Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation
Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Shenzhen, China · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
VLAGuard: A Framework for Evaluating and Mitigating Physical Attention Hijacking in Vision-Language-Action Robots within Wireless Sensor Networks
Aug 2, 2026Dongfu Yin, Jinquan ZhangAdversarial Patch Attacks Adversarial Attacks on VLA Models
Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Shenzhen, China · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
Revisiting the Adversarial Robustness of Graph-Based Traffic Forecasting
Jul 30, 2026Qingzhao ZhangAdversarial Attacks Adversarial Robustness
The University of Arizoan
Physically Real-time Infrared Attack against Optical Flow Estimation Networks
Jul 29, 2026Shen You, Wei Jiang, Jiarui Liu +4Optical Flow Adversarial Attacks
City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR · University of Electronic Science and Technology Chengdu, Sichuan, China · Shenzhen University Shenzhen,Guangdong,China +1
Hiding in Plain Sight: An Effective Physical Adversarial Patch Attack against Visual-Infrared Fused Face Detection
Jul 25, 2026Qiucheng Yu, Tao Ni, Yihe Zhou +2Adversarial Patch Attacks Face Recognition
City University of Hong Kong · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
ISPCloak: Weaponizing ISP for Optimization-Free Physical Camouflage against Deepfake Detectors
Jul 24, 2026Jiale Zhao, Jiajun Wan, Lei Tang +3Adversarial Attacks Deepfake Detection
Guangdong University of Technology Guangzhou, China · Guizhou Provincial Laboratory of Big Data, State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University Guiyang, China
Detectors Learn the Wrong Thing: Shortcut-Resistant Adversarial Training Against Physically Realizable Attacks
Jul 23, 2026Yuanhao Huang, Yilong Ren, Jinlei Wang +3Adversarial Training Adversarial Robustness
School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University, 100191, Beijing, P.R China · Zhongguancun Laboratory, 100191, Beijing, P.R China · School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, 510006, Guangzhou, P.R China +2
ALLUDE: A Unified Evaluation System for Configurable Attacks in Differentiable Environments
Jul 19, 2026Mansi Phute, Alexander Greenhalgh, Matthew Hull +8Object Detection Physical Adversarial Attacks
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · Technological Innovation Institute, UAE
AdvSerial: Physical Adversarial Attacks on Infrastructure-mounted Pedestrian Detectors via Semantic Feature Suppression
Jul 19, 2026Yuanhao Huang, Yilong Ren, Jinlei Wang +3Adversarial Patch Attacks Adversarial Attacks
School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University, 100191, Beijing, P.R China · Zhongguancun Laboratory, 100191, Beijing, P.R China · School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, 510006, Guangzhou, P.R China +1
Lights, Camera, Malfunction: When Illumination Robustness Leaves VLA Models Blind to Color
Jul 16, 2026Marino Watanabe, Takami Sato, Kentaro YoshiokaAdversarial Training Adversarial Attacks
Keio University
Banshee: Target Switch Attacks on Gimbal-Stabilized Visual Tracking Systems via Acoustic Injection
Jul 10, 2026Jiarui Li, Joseph Brewington, Qingzhao Zhang +1Aerial Robotics Visual Object Tracking
University of Michigan · The University of Arizona
AirflowAttack: Thermal-Airflow Adversarial Perturbations against Infrared Remote-Sensing Vision-Language Models
Jul 7, 2026Cong Su, Jiaju Han, Xuemeng Sun +5Adversarial Attacks on VLMs Remote Sensing
Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · China University of Petroleum-Beijing at Karamay, Karamay, Xinjiang, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Oct 23, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Towards Effective and Transferable Physical Camouflage against Multi-View BEV-based 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving

Linye Lyu, Jiawei Zhou, Daojing He, Yu Li

Adversarial Attacks Physical Adversarial Attacks Autonomous Driving Perception Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

Open paper AskPDF arXiv

Modern autonomous driving systems widely adopt multi-view Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) based 3D perception models due to their superior performance. Despite their success, the robustness of these models against adversarial camouflage attacks remains largely unexplored. Existing camouflage attacks primarily target single-view 2D detectors, limiting their effectiveness in multi-view 3D perception settings. To address this gap, we propose BEVCA, a novel adversarial camouflage generation framework tailored for multi-view BEV-based 3D perception. Our framework integrates a BEV-feature-based adversarial loss with a multi-view neural rendering module, enabling effective and transferable camouflage attacks across different models and tasks. Extensive experiments in both digital and physical settings demonstrate that BEVCA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits strong robustness under real-world conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/WAVE-AT-IDEA/BEVCA.