Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

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Overview

Transfer-based adversarial attacks study how to craft adversarial inputs using a surrogate model that also fool unseen target models, often when those targets are black boxes. Common approaches use gradient-based optimization, surrogate ensembles, input transformations, or alignment of semantic and intermediate features to reduce overfitting to one model. The methods span image classifiers, object detectors, speech systems, and vision-language models, with work also exploring physical patches and constraints on perceptual quality. A central challenge is that gains depend on how well the surrogate matches the target, so transfer success can vary across architectures and settings, making careful source–target evaluation essential.

Latest papers

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80 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, up 200% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. 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 AttacksPhysical Adversarial Attacks

  2. MIG-COW: Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Deepfake Detectors via Gradient Decomposition

    Oct 22, 2026Wonjune Seo, Joonhyuk Baek, Yeseong Jung +1Adversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Ulsan, Republic of Korea

  3. Bridging Digital Deception and Physical Fidelity: A Spatio-Temporal Attack on Cognitive Radars

    Oct 20, 2026Tongrun Xing, Yongjun Dai, Xuan Liao +4Adversarial AttacksPhysical 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

  4. Tricking Synthetic Image Detectors with Amortized Generative Attacks

    Oct 18, 2026Mohamed Awad, Khaled Elhady, Yasser Rohaim +2Adversarial Attacks on AI-Generated Image DetectorsAdversarial Attacks

    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  5. Transferable Spatial Temporal Coherence Adversarial Attack on Black-Box Vision Language Models for Autonomous Driving

    Oct 6, 2026Heyam Bin Jahlan Areej Alhothali Abeer AlhothaliAdversarial Attacks on VLMsVLMs for Autonomous Driving

  6. TAPDreamer: Transferable Adversarial Patches for World Action Models

    Oct 5, 2026Xuanyu Lu, Fengqing Jiang, Kaiyuan Zheng +8Adversarial Patch AttacksAdversarial Attacks

    University of Washington · University of Georgia · Western Washington University +2

  7. Reward Stealing Attack on Large Language Models

    Oct 5, 2026Jiaming Qian, Pengyang Zhou, Jiahe Xu +1LLM AlignmentModel Extraction Attacks

    Zhejiang University

  8. Boosting Transferable Adversarial Attacks against Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 5, 2026Zexin Li, Ruili Yao, Yiming Zeng +1Adversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Nanyang Technological University · University of California, Riverside · University of Connecticut +1

  9. Visual-Invariance-Augmented Feature Optimal Alignment for Transferable Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs

    Oct 4, 2026Xiaojun Jia, Simeng Qin, Yiming Li +5Adversarial Attacks on VLMsAdversarial Attacks

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China · Chongqing University, Chongqing, China +2

  10. Pareto-Improving Adversarial Attacks with Primal-Dual Regularization

    Oct 3, 2026Yang Dai, Longfei Zhang, Wei Tao +3Adversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Laboratory for Big Data and Decision, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China

  11. Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework

    Sep 30, 2026Yaohua Liu, Yifan Guo, Jiaxin GaoAdversarial AttacksBilevel Optimization

    The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China · International School of Information Science & Engineering Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong, China

  12. FinRT: Distilling Adaptive Red-Teaming Strategies into Reusable Adversarial Generators in Consumer Finance

    Sep 29, 2026Rikhiya Ghosh, Himanshu Kumar, Sriram Venkatapathy +3Adversarial Prompt GenerationAdversarial Attacks on LLMs

    AI Foundations, Capital One

  13. One Attack to Fool Them All: Highly Transferable Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Frontier MLLMs

    Sep 27, 2026Sen Nie, Jie Zhang, Zhongqi Wang +2Adversarial Attacks on VLMsAdversarial Attacks on LLMs

    State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

  14. AnchorRep: Defending LLMs Against Cross-Model Adversarial Transfer via Representation Repulsion

    Sep 26, 2026Gal Wertheizer, Rom Himelstein, Tomer Peretz +1Adversarial RobustnessAdversarial Robustness of Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, Technion — Israel Institute of Technology · Department of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion — Israel Institute of Technology

  15. Adversarial Attacks and Identity Leakage in De-Identification Systems: An Empirical Study

    Sep 22, 2026Felix Rosberg, Cristofer Englund, Eren Erdal Aksoy +1Adversarial RobustnessTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

  16. What Makes Adversarial Examples Transfer Across Deepfake Detectors?

    Sep 9, 2026Rafael M. Mamede, Pedro C. Neto, Ana F. SequeiraAdversarial RobustnessDeepfake Detection

    INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal · Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP), Porto, Portugal · Unilabs, Porto, Portugal

  17. Rethinking the Transferable Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defense in Federated Learning

    Aug 25, 2026Zuobin Xiong, Deval Mukherjee, Homook Cho +1Federated LearningTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, USA · Cyber Security Research Center at KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea · Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

  18. Text-Anchored Semantic Perturbations for Transferable Jailbreak Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models

    Aug 23, 2026Wenyun Li, Guiping Cao, Xiangyuan Lan +1Adversarial Attacks on Unified Multimodal ModelsMultimodal Jailbreak Attacks

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu), Guangzhou, China

  19. Perspective-Invariant Attack with Enhanced Transferability of Adversarial Examples

    Aug 15, 2026Kaisheng Liang, Yiming Cao, Bin XiaoAdversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

  20. Learning with Bilevel-Minimax Optimization for Efficient and Reliable Transfer Attacks

    Aug 12, 2026Yaohua Liu, Yifan Guo, Jiaxin GaoBilevel OptimizationTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · International School of Information Science & Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

  21. IDATA: Scalable Invertible Diffusion for Unrestricted Adversarial Transfer Attack

    Aug 9, 2026Yi Pan, Jun-Jie Huang, Tianrui Liu +3Adversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    College of Computer Science and Technology

  22. Diffusion LLMs as Targets and Adversaries: Mechanistic Safety Exploits

    Aug 7, 2026Elena Dumitrescu, Gert Lek, Lydia Y. Chen +1Adversarial Attacks on LLMsLLM Safety Alignment

    Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands · University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

  23. Season: Spectrum-Aware Orthogonal Gradient Refinement for Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Aug 5, 2026Tianyi Wang, Zhenghao Gao, Shengjie XuAdversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    Tongji University Shanghai, China · Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Wuhan LightRead Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. Wuhan, China

  24. Mind the Gap: Zero-Query Jailbreaks via Filter-Generator Discrepancy in Text-to-Image Systems

    Aug 2, 2026Wanguang Li, Zhaoxin Wang, Handing WangAdversarial Prompt GenerationT2I Generation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Shaanxi, China

  25. DiffAttack: Evasion Attacks Against Face Recognition via Latent Diffusion Models

    Jul 31, 2026Omid Ahmadieh, Nima KarimianAdversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    University of South Florida Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing Tampa, Florida, USA

  26. IGME: Efficient Chained Method Ensemble for Transferable Semantic Segmentation Attacks

    Jul 29, 2026Mengqi He, Jing ZhangAdversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    School of Computing, College of Systems & Society · The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

  27. TIGA: Trajectory-Injected Generative Attack against Black-box AIGC Detectors

    Jul 28, 2026Xia Du, Zhuosen Bao, Zheng Lin +4Adversarial AttacksTransfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

    School of Computer and Information Engineering, Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen, 361000, China · Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, L-1855 Luxembourg, Luxembourg · School of Computer Science, Engineering Research Center of Machine Learning and Industry Intelligence, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, 610020, China +2

  28. GeoThreat: Transferable Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models for Remote Sensing Image Interpretation

    Jul 23, 2026Yimin Fu, Yuefeng Bai, Baicheng Pan +2Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingAdversarial Attacks on VLMs

    Department of Mathematics, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China · School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

  29. On Success and Simplicity: A Second Look at Transferable Vision-Language Attack Pipeline

    Jul 16, 2026Yuchen Ren, Zhengyu Zhao, Chenhao Lin +2VLM RobustnessAdversarial Attacks on VLMs

    School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, China

  30. Technical Report on the CVPR 2026@AdvML Workshop Challenge

    Jul 13, 2026Tianyuan Zhang, Zonglei Jing, Jiangfan Liu +47VLMs for Autonomous DrivingAdversarial Attacks on VLA Models