English

Boosting Adversarial Transferability via High-Frequency Augmentation and Hierarchical-Gradient Fusion

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-05-28 v1 Image and Video Processing

Abstract

Adversarial attacks have become a significant challenge in the security of machine learning models, particularly in the context of black-box defense strategies. Existing methods for enhancing adversarial transferability primarily focus on the spatial domain. This paper presents Frequency-Space Attack (FSA), a new adversarial attack framework that effectively integrates frequency-domain and spatial-domain transformations. FSA combines two key techniques: (1) High-Frequency Augmentation, which applies Fourier transform with frequency-selective amplification to diversify inputs and emphasize the critical role of high-frequency components in adversarial attacks, and (2) Hierarchical-Gradient Fusion, which merges multi-scale gradient decomposition and fusion to capture both global structures and fine-grained details, resulting in smoother perturbations. Our experiment demonstrates that FSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various black-box models. Notably, our proposed FSA achieves an average attack success rate increase of 23.6% compared with BSR (CVPR 2024) on eight black-box defense models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.21181,
  title  = {Boosting Adversarial Transferability via High-Frequency Augmentation and Hierarchical-Gradient Fusion},
  author = {Yayin Zheng and Chen Wan and Zihong Guo and Hailing Kuang and Xiaohai Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21181},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:42:58.501Z