English

Dual-Flow: Transferable Multi-Target, Instance-Agnostic Attacks via In-the-wild Cascading Flow Optimization

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-10-28 v3

Abstract

Adversarial attacks are widely used to evaluate model robustness, and in black-box scenarios, the transferability of these attacks becomes crucial. Existing generator-based attacks have excellent generalization and transferability due to their instance-agnostic nature. However, when training generators for multi-target tasks, the success rate of transfer attacks is relatively low due to the limitations of the model's capacity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual-Flow framework for multi-target instance-agnostic adversarial attacks, utilizing Cascading Distribution Shift Training to develop an adversarial velocity function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dual-Flow significantly improves transferability over previous multi-target generative attacks. For example, it increases the success rate from Inception-v3 to ResNet-152 by 34.58\%. Furthermore, our attack method shows substantially stronger robustness against defense mechanisms, such as adversarially trained models. The code of Dual-Flow is available at: \href\href{https://github.com/Chyxx/Dual-Flow}{https://github.com/Chyxx/Dual-Flow}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.02096,
  title  = {Dual-Flow: Transferable Multi-Target, Instance-Agnostic Attacks via In-the-wild Cascading Flow Optimization},
  author = {Yixiao Chen and Shikun Sun and Jianshu Li and Ruoyu Li and Zhe Li and Junliang Xing},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02096},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at NeurIPS 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:31:46.669Z