Physical Adversarial Attacks

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Overview

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

CardsList

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

  1. Revealing Physical-World Semantic Vulnerabilities: Universal Adversarial Patch for Infrared Vision-Language Models

    Apr 3, 2026Chengyin Hu, Yuxian Dong, Yikun Guo +8Adversarial Attacks on VLMsVLM Robustness

    China University of Petroleum-Beijing at Karamay, No. 355 Anding Road, Karamay 834000, Xinjiang, China. · the Defense Innovation Institute, Chinese Academy of Military Science, Beijing, China. · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China. +1

  2. Street-Legal Physical-World Adversarial Rim for License Plates

    Apr 2, 2026Nikhil Kalidasu, Sahana GanapathyAdversarial AttacksPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX 78705, USA

  3. Tex3D: Objects as Attack Surfaces via Adversarial 3D Textures for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Apr 2, 2026Jiawei Chen, Simin Huang, Jiawei Du +5Adversarial Attacks on VLA ModelsAdversarial Examples

    East China Normal University · Zhongguancun Academy · CFAR, A*STAR, Singapore +2

  4. Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attenuation Patch against SAR Object Detection

    Apr 1, 2026Yiming Zhang, Weibo Qin, Feng WangAdversarial AttacksAdversarial Patch Attacks

    Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE), School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

  5. Out of Sight, Out of Track: Adversarial Attacks on Propagation-based Multi-Object Trackers via Query State Manipulation

    Apr 1, 2026Halima Bouzidi, Haoyu Liu, Yonatan Gizachew Achamyeleh +2Adversarial AttacksMulti-Object Tracking

    University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

  6. Neural Reconstruction of LiDAR Point Clouds under Jamming Attacks via Full-Waveform Representation and Simultaneous Laser Sensing

    Apr 1, 2026Ryo Yoshida, Takami Sato, Wenlun Zhang +7Point Cloud LearningPoint Cloud Surface Reconstruction

    Keio University, Yokohama, Japan · Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Atsugi, Japan · Hainan University, Haikou, China

  7. From Pixels to Reality: Physical-Digital Patch Attacks on Real-World Camera

    Mar 30, 2026Victoria Leonenkova, Ekaterina Shumitskaya, Dmitriy Vatolin +1Adversarial AttacksAdversarial Patch Attacks

    Lomonosov MSU, Moscow, Russia · AI Center, Lomonosov MSU, IAI MSU, Moscow, Russia

  8. When Surfaces Lie: Exploiting Wrinkle-Induced Attention Shift to Attack Vision-Language Models

    Mar 29, 2026Chengyin Hu, Xuemeng Sun, Jiaju Han +5Adversarial Attacks on VLMsAdversarial Attacks

  9. R-PGA: Robust Physical Adversarial Camouflage Generation via Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting

    Mar 27, 2026Tianrui Lou, Siyuan Liang, Jiawei Liang +2Physical Adversarial AttacksConsistent Adversarial Attacks

    School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China · School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 117417, Singapore · School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Shenzhen Campus, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China

  10. Thermal Topology Collapse: Universal Physical Patch Attacks on Infrared Vision Systems

    Mar 23, 2026Chengyin Hu, Yikun Guo, Yuxian Dong +7Adversarial Patch AttacksPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    China University of Petroleum-Beijing at Karamay, No. 355, Anding Road, Karamay, 834000, Xinjiang, China. · Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. · Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. +1

  11. Adversarial Camouflage

    Mar 23, 2026Paweł Borsukiewicz, Daniele Lunghi, Melissa Tessa +2Physical Adversarial AttacksFace Recognition

    University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

  12. In-the-Wild Camouflage Attack on Vehicle Detectors through Controllable Image Editing

    Mar 19, 2026Xiao Fang, Yiming Gong, Stanislav Panev +4Adversarial Attacks on Object DetectorsObject Detection

    Carnegie Mellon University · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory · Florida State University

  13. Over-the-air White-box Attack on the Wav2Vec Speech Recognition Neural Network

    Mar 17, 2026Protopopov AlexeyAdversarial ExamplesPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    Joint Stock Research and Production Company Kryptonite

  14. D-SLAMSpoof: An Environment-Agnostic LiDAR Spoofing Attack using Dynamic Point Cloud Injection

    Mar 11, 2026Rokuto Nagata, Kenji Koide, Kazuma Ikeda +2Physical Adversarial AttacksSimultaneous Localization and Mapping

    Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Keio University · Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

  15. MirrorDrift: Actuated Mirror-Based Attacks on LiDAR SLAM

    Mar 11, 2026Rokuto Nagata, Kenji Koide, Kazuma Ikeda +3Physical Adversarial AttacksLiDAR Localization

    Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Keio University · Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

  16. Comparative Analysis of Patch Attack on VLM-Based Autonomous Driving Architectures

    Mar 9, 2026David Fernandez, Pedram MohajerAnsari, Amir Salarpour +3Adversarial Attacks on VLMsVLM Robustness

    School of Computing, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

  17. Beyond the Patch: Exploring Vulnerabilities of Visuomotor Policies via Viewpoint-Consistent 3D Adversarial Object

    Mar 5, 2026Chanmi Lee, Minsung Yoon, Woojae Kim +2Adversarial AttacksPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    The School of Computing at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea

  18. Analyzing Physical Adversarial Example Threats to Machine Learning in Election Systems

    Feb 28, 2026Khaleque Md Aashiq Kamal, Surya Eada, Aayushi Verma +4Adversarial AttacksAdversarial Examples

    Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA · Voting Technology Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA · Department of Computer Science and Statistics, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA

  19. Physical Evaluation of Naturalistic Adversarial Patches for Camera-Based Traffic-Sign Detection

    Feb 27, 2026Brianna D'Urso, Tahmid Hasan Sakib, Syed Rafay Hasan +1Traffic Sign DetectionPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    Department of Computing Sciences, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN, USA · Center for Manufacturing Research, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN, USA

  20. Can a Teenager Fool an AI? Evaluating Low-Cost Cosmetic Attacks on Age Estimation Systems

    Feb 23, 2026Xingyu Shen, Tommy Duong, Xiaodong An +6Adversarial AttacksPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    Reality Inc. · Duke University · UC Berkeley +3

  21. Dynamic Deception: When Pedestrians Team Up to Fool Autonomous Cars

    Feb 20, 2026Masoud Jamshidiyan Tehrani, Marco Gabriel, Jinhan Kim +1Physical Adversarial AttacksAdversarial Patch Attacks

    Università della Svizzera italiana Lugano, Switzerland

  22. UNDREAM: Bridging Differentiable Rendering and Photorealistic Simulation for End-to-end Adversarial Attacks

    Oct 19, 2025Mansi Phute, Matthew Hull, Haoran Wang +6Adversarial AttacksAdversarial Perturbations

    Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · Technology Innovation Institute, UAE

  23. A Simulation Framework for Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks on Image Sensors

    Aug 9, 2024Youqian Zhang, MK Michael Cheung, Chunxi Yang +6Adversarial RobustnessPhysical Adversarial Attacks

    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong · The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong · Simon Fraser University, Canada