Making Adversarial Examples More Transferable and Indistinguishable
Junhua Zou, Yexin Duan, Boyu Li, Wu Zhang, Yu Pan, Zhisong Pan
Abstract
Fast gradient sign attack series are popular methods that are used to generate adversarial examples. However, most of the approaches based on fast gradient sign attack series cannot balance the indistinguishability and transferability due to the limitations of the basic sign structure. To address this problem, we propose a method, called Adam Iterative Fast Gradient Tanh Method (AI-FGTM), to generate indistinguishable adversarial examples with high transferability. Besides, smaller kernels and dynamic step size are also applied to generate adversarial examples for further increasing the attack success rates. Extensive experiments on an ImageNet-compatible dataset show that our method generates more indistinguishable adversarial examples and achieves higher attack success rates without extra running time and resource. Our best transfer-based attack NI-TI-DI-AITM can fool six classic defense models with an average success rate of 89.3% and three advanced defense models with an average success rate of 82.7%, which are higher than the state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks. Additionally, our method can also reduce nearly 20% mean perturbation. We expect that our method will serve as a new baseline for generating adversarial examples with better transferability and indistinguishability.
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Cited by top-tier papers3
- Boosting Adversarial Transferability via Gradient Relevance AttackHegui Zhu, Yuchen Ren, Xiaoyan Sui, Lianping Yang et al.ICCV 2023 · 80 citations
- Attention! Your Vision Language Model Could Be Maliciously ManipulatedXiaosen Wang, Shaokang Wang, Zhijin Ge, Yuyang Luo et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 13 citations
- Robust Adversarial Attacks Against Unknown Disturbance via Inverse Gradient SampleZhaoyang Zhang, Shen Wang, Runze Liu, Guopu Zhu et al.ICLR 2026
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