Timestep-Compressed Attack on Spiking Neural Networks Through Timestep-Level Backpropagation

State-of-the-art (SOTA) gradient-based adversarial attacks on spiking neural networks (SNNs), which largely rely on extending FGSM and PGD frameworks, face a critical limitation: substantial attack latency from multi-timestep processing, rendering them infeasible for practical real-time applications. This inefficiency stems from their design as direct extensions of ANN paradigms, which fail to exploit key SNN properties. In this paper, we propose the timestep compressed attack (TCA), a novel framework that significantly reduces attack latency. TCA introduces two components founded on key insights into SNN behavior. First, timestep-level backpropagation (TLBP) is based on our finding that global temporal information in backpropagation to generate perturbations is not critical for an attack’s success, enabling per-timestep evaluation for early stopping. Second, adversarial membrane potential reuse (A-MPR) is motivated by the observation that initial timesteps are inefficiently spent accumulating membrane potential, a warm-up phase that can be pre-calculated and reused. Our experiments on VGG-11 and ResNet-17 with the CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS datasets show that TCA significantly reduces the required attack latency by up to 56.6% and 57.1% compared to SOTA methods in white-box and black-box settings, respectively, while maintaining a comparable attack success rate.