Improving transferability of adversarial examples via Bayesian attacks (original) (raw)

Li, Qizhang, Guo, Yiwen, Yang, Xiaochen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9299-5951, Zuo, Wangmeng and Chen, Hao(2025) Improving transferability of adversarial examples via Bayesian attacks.IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, (doi: 10.1109/TCSVT.2025.3609284) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

The transferability of adversarial examples allows for the attack on unknown deep neural networks (DNNs), posing a serious threat to many applications and attracting great attention. In this paper, we improve the transferability of adversarial examples by incorporating the Bayesian formulation into both the model parameters and model input, enabling their joint diversification. We demonstrate that combination of Bayesian formulations for both the model input and model parameters yields significant improvements in transferability. By introducing advanced approximations of the posterior distribution over the model input, adversarial transferability achieves further enhancement, surpassing all state-of-the-arts when attacking without model fine-tuning. Additionally, we propose a principled approach to fine-tune model parameters within this Bayesian framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art in transfer-based attacks, significantly improving the average success rate on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. We will make our code publicly available.

Item Type: Articles
Keywords: Deep neural networks, adversarial examples, transferability, generalization ability.
Status: Early Online Publication
Refereed: Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Yang, Dr Xiaochen
Authors: Li, Q., Guo, Y., Yang, X., Zuo, W., and Chen, H.
College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Mathematics and Statistics > Statistics
Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Publisher: IEEE
ISSN: 1051-8215
ISSN (Online): 1558-2205
Published Online: 19 September 2025
Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2025 IEEE
Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher

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Deposit and Record Details

ID Code: 369864
Depositing User: Dr Aniko Szilagyi
Datestamp: 20 Oct 2025 13:34
Last Modified: 21 Oct 2025 01:35
Date of acceptance: 9 September 2025
Date of first online publication: 19 September 2025
Date Deposited: 20 October 2025
Data Availability Statement: No