Daily Papers

It is becoming increasingly clear that many machine learning classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In attempting to explain the origin of adversarial examples, previous studies have typically focused on the fact that neural networks operate on high dimensional data, they overfit, or they are too linear. Here we argue that the origin of adversarial examples is primarily due to an inherent uncertainty that neural networks have about their predictions. We show that the functional form of this uncertainty is independent of architecture, dataset, and training protocol; and depends only on the statistics of the logit differences of the network, which do not change significantly during training. This leads to adversarial error having a universal scaling, as a power-law, with respect to the size of the adversarial perturbation. We show that this universality holds for a broad range of datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, ImageNet, and random data), models (including state-of-the-art deep networks, linear models, adversarially trained networks, and networks trained on randomly shuffled labels), and attacks (FGSM, step l.l., PGD). Motivated by these results, we study the effects of reducing prediction entropy on adversarial robustness. Finally, we study the effect of network architectures on adversarial sensitivity. To do this, we use neural architecture search with reinforcement learning to find adversarially robust architectures on CIFAR10. Our resulting architecture is more robust to white and black box attacks compared to previous attempts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun to address this by introducing error signals, most rely on shallow, static errors, restricting improvement in deep diagnostic ability. To overcome this, we propose Hide and Seek Game (HSG), a dynamic adversarial framework for error generation and diagnosis, and evaluate it on mathematical problem-solving. HSG involves two adversarial roles: Sneaky, which "hides" by generating subtle, deceptive reasoning errors, and Diagnosis, which "seeks" to accurately detect them. Through adversarial co-evolution, both error stealth and diagnostic precision are enhanced. Experiments on several math reasoning tasks show that HSG significantly boosts error diagnosis, achieving 16.8\%--31.4\% higher accuracy than baselines like GPT-4o. We also release a challenging dataset of deceptive errors and diagnostic annotations as a benchmark for future research.

The shift from monolithic LLMs to distributed multi-agent architectures demands new frameworks for verifying and securing autonomous coordination. Unlike traditional multi-agent systems focused on cooperative state alignment, modern LLM patterns: multi-agent debate, constitutional oversight, helper-critic loops-rely on adversarial critique for error correction and reasoning refinement. Since LLMs are dynamical systems whose latent states are imperfectly observable from verbalized outputs, securing these networks requires understanding both macroscopic topology and microscopic agent observability. This paper establishes a rigorous graph-theoretic framework for analyzing consensus in signed, directed interaction networks, bridging graph theory and LLM reasoning by formally mapping Transformer cross-entropy log-odds to the signed Laplacian. We characterize agreement stability through structural balance theory, showing how unbalanced critique cycles produce logical frustration and persistent reasoning oscillations, and prove that unobservable latent states from hidden system prompts act as topological Trojan horses that destabilize cooperative consensus. To resolve unobservable deadlocks, we restrict interaction topologies to chordal graphs and apply matrix decomposition with Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization, proving that rank-one spectral edge perturbations deterministically break expertise symmetry by shifting eigenvalues into the stable left-half plane. Core contributions include consensus theorems, polynomial-time Perfect Elimination Ordering verification algorithms, and large-scale empirical validation on clustered ensembles of LLaMA-3, Mistral, and Gemma agents.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising direction to exploit massive amount of offline data for complex decision-making tasks. Due to the distribution shift issue, current offline RL algorithms are generally designed to be conservative in value estimation and action selection. However, such conservatism can impair the robustness of learned policies when encountering observation deviation under realistic conditions, such as sensor errors and adversarial attacks. To trade off robustness and conservatism, we propose Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning (RORL) with a novel conservative smoothing technique. In RORL, we explicitly introduce regularization on the policy and the value function for states near the dataset, as well as additional conservative value estimation on these states. Theoretically, we show RORL enjoys a tighter suboptimality bound than recent theoretical results in linear MDPs. We demonstrate that RORL can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the general offline RL benchmark and is considerably robust to adversarial observation perturbations.

Adversarial examples are inputs to machine learning models designed to cause the model to make a mistake. They are useful for understanding the shortcomings of machine learning models, interpreting their results, and for regularisation. In NLP, however, most example generation strategies produce input text by using known, pre-specified semantic transformations, requiring significant manual effort and in-depth understanding of the problem and domain. In this paper, we investigate the problem of automatically generating adversarial examples that violate a set of given First-Order Logic constraints in Natural Language Inference (NLI). We reduce the problem of identifying such adversarial examples to a combinatorial optimisation problem, by maximising a quantity measuring the degree of violation of such constraints and by using a language model for generating linguistically-plausible examples. Furthermore, we propose a method for adversarially regularising neural NLI models for incorporating background knowledge. Our results show that, while the proposed method does not always improve results on the SNLI and MultiNLI datasets, it significantly and consistently increases the predictive accuracy on adversarially-crafted datasets -- up to a 79.6% relative improvement -- while drastically reducing the number of background knowledge violations. Furthermore, we show that adversarial examples transfer among model architectures, and that the proposed adversarial training procedure improves the robustness of NLI models to adversarial examples.

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) is a promising score distillation technique that compresses pre-trained teacher diffusion models into efficient one-step or multi-step student generators. Nevertheless, its reliance on the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence minimization potentially induces mode collapse (or mode-seeking) in certain applications. To circumvent this inherent drawback, we propose Adversarial Distribution Matching (ADM), a novel framework that leverages diffusion-based discriminators to align the latent predictions between real and fake score estimators for score distillation in an adversarial manner. In the context of extremely challenging one-step distillation, we further improve the pre-trained generator by adversarial distillation with hybrid discriminators in both latent and pixel spaces. Different from the mean squared error used in DMD2 pre-training, our method incorporates the distributional loss on ODE pairs collected from the teacher model, and thus providing a better initialization for score distillation fine-tuning in the next stage. By combining the adversarial distillation pre-training with ADM fine-tuning into a unified pipeline termed DMDX, our proposed method achieves superior one-step performance on SDXL compared to DMD2 while consuming less GPU time. Additional experiments that apply multi-step ADM distillation on SD3-Medium, SD3.5-Large, and CogVideoX set a new benchmark towards efficient image and video synthesis.

The generative adversarial network (GAN) is a well-known model for learning high-dimensional distributions, but the mechanism for its generalization ability is not understood. In particular, GAN is vulnerable to the memorization phenomenon, the eventual convergence to the empirical distribution. We consider a simplified GAN model with the generator replaced by a density, and analyze how the discriminator contributes to generalization. We show that with early stopping, the generalization error measured by Wasserstein metric escapes from the curse of dimensionality, despite that in the long term, memorization is inevitable. In addition, we present a hardness of learning result for WGAN.

Reference-free evaluation metrics for grammatical error correction (GEC) have achieved high correlation with human judgments. However, these metrics are not designed to evaluate adversarial systems that aim to obtain unjustifiably high scores. The existence of such systems undermines the reliability of automatic evaluation, as it can mislead users in selecting appropriate GEC systems. In this study, we propose adversarial attack strategies for four reference-free metrics: SOME, Scribendi, IMPARA, and LLM-based metrics, and demonstrate that our adversarial systems outperform the current state-of-the-art. These findings highlight the need for more robust evaluation methods.

Deep neural network models are used today in various applications of artificial intelligence, the strengthening of which, in the face of adversarial attacks is of particular importance. An appropriate solution to adversarial attacks is adversarial training, which reaches a trade-off between robustness and generalization. This paper introduces a novel framework (Layer Sustainability Analysis (LSA)) for the analysis of layer vulnerability in an arbitrary neural network in the scenario of adversarial attacks. LSA can be a helpful toolkit to assess deep neural networks and to extend the adversarial training approaches towards improving the sustainability of model layers via layer monitoring and analysis. The LSA framework identifies a list of Most Vulnerable Layers (MVL list) of the given network. The relative error, as a comparison measure, is used to evaluate representation sustainability of each layer against adversarial inputs. The proposed approach for obtaining robust neural networks to fend off adversarial attacks is based on a layer-wise regularization (LR) over LSA proposal(s) for adversarial training (AT); i.e. the AT-LR procedure. AT-LR could be used with any benchmark adversarial attack to reduce the vulnerability of network layers and to improve conventional adversarial training approaches. The proposed idea performs well theoretically and experimentally for state-of-the-art multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural network architectures. Compared with the AT-LR and its corresponding base adversarial training, the classification accuracy of more significant perturbations increased by 16.35%, 21.79%, and 10.730% on Moon, MNIST, and CIFAR-10 benchmark datasets, respectively. The LSA framework is available and published at https://github.com/khalooei/LSA.

Software is used in critical applications in our day-to-day life and it is important to ensure its correctness. One popular approach to assess correctness is to evaluate software on tests. If a test fails, it indicates a fault in the software under test; if all tests pass correctly, one may assume that the software is correct. However, the reliability of these results depends on the test suite considered, and there is a risk of false negatives (i.e. software that passes all available tests but contains bugs because some cases are not tested). Therefore, it is important to consider error-inducing test cases when evaluating software. To support data-driven creation of such a test-suite, which is especially of interest for testing software synthesized from large language models, we curate a dataset (Codehacks) of programming problems together with corresponding error-inducing test cases (i.e., "hacks"). This dataset is collected from the wild, in particular, from the Codeforces online judge platform. The dataset comprises 288,617 hacks for 5,578 programming problems, each with a natural language description, as well as the source code for 2,196 submitted solutions to these problems that can be broken with their corresponding hacks. Keywords: competitive programming, language model, dataset

We study image segmentation from an information-theoretic perspective, proposing a novel adversarial method that performs unsupervised segmentation by partitioning images into maximally independent sets. More specifically, we group image pixels into foreground and background, with the goal of minimizing predictability of one set from the other. An easily computed loss drives a greedy search process to maximize inpainting error over these partitions. Our method does not involve training deep networks, is computationally cheap, class-agnostic, and even applicable in isolation to a single unlabeled image. Experiments demonstrate that it achieves a new state-of-the-art in unsupervised segmentation quality, while being substantially faster and more general than competing approaches.

Research of adversarial attacks is important for AI security because it shows the vulnerability of deep learning models and helps to build more robust models. Adversarial attacks on images are most widely studied, which include noise-based attacks, image editing-based attacks, and latent space-based attacks. However, the adversarial examples crafted by these methods often lack sufficient semantic information, making it challenging for humans to understand the failure modes of deep learning models under natural conditions. To address this limitation, we propose a natural language induced adversarial image attack method. The core idea is to leverage a text-to-image model to generate adversarial images given input prompts, which are maliciously constructed to lead to misclassification for a target model. To adopt commercial text-to-image models for synthesizing more natural adversarial images, we propose an adaptive genetic algorithm (GA) for optimizing discrete adversarial prompts without requiring gradients and an adaptive word space reduction method for improving query efficiency. We further used CLIP to maintain the semantic consistency of the generated images. In our experiments, we found that some high-frequency semantic information such as "foggy", "humid", "stretching", etc. can easily cause classifier errors. This adversarial semantic information exists not only in generated images but also in photos captured in the real world. We also found that some adversarial semantic information can be transferred to unknown classification tasks. Furthermore, our attack method can transfer to different text-to-image models (e.g., Midjourney, DALL-E 3, etc.) and image classifiers. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zxp555/Natural-Language-Induced-Adversarial-Images.

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a central task in scientific computing. Recently, neural network approximation of PDEs has received increasing attention due to its flexible meshless discretization and its potential for high-dimensional problems. One fundamental numerical difficulty is that random samples in the training set introduce statistical errors into the discretization of loss functional which may become the dominant error in the final approximation, and therefore overshadow the modeling capability of the neural network. In this work, we propose a new minmax formulation to optimize simultaneously the approximate solution, given by a neural network model, and the random samples in the training set, provided by a deep generative model. The key idea is to use a deep generative model to adjust random samples in the training set such that the residual induced by the approximate PDE solution can maintain a smooth profile when it is being minimized. Such an idea is achieved by implicitly embedding the Wasserstein distance between the residual-induced distribution and the uniform distribution into the loss, which is then minimized together with the residual. A nearly uniform residual profile means that its variance is small for any normalized weight function such that the Monte Carlo approximation error of the loss functional is reduced significantly for a certain sample size. The adversarial adaptive sampling (AAS) approach proposed in this work is the first attempt to formulate two essential components, minimizing the residual and seeking the optimal training set, into one minmax objective functional for the neural network approximation of PDEs.

The tremendous amount of accessible data in cyberspace face the risk of being unauthorized used for training deep learning models. To address this concern, methods are proposed to make data unlearnable for deep learning models by adding a type of error-minimizing noise. However, such conferred unlearnability is found fragile to adversarial training. In this paper, we design new methods to generate robust unlearnable examples that are protected from adversarial training. We first find that the vanilla error-minimizing noise, which suppresses the informative knowledge of data via minimizing the corresponding training loss, could not effectively minimize the adversarial training loss. This explains the vulnerability of error-minimizing noise in adversarial training. Based on the observation, robust error-minimizing noise is then introduced to reduce the adversarial training loss. Experiments show that the unlearnability brought by robust error-minimizing noise can effectively protect data from adversarial training in various scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/fshp971/robust-unlearnable-examples.

Detecting abnormal activities in real-world surveillance videos is an important yet challenging task as the prior knowledge about video anomalies is usually limited or unavailable. Despite that many approaches have been developed to resolve this problem, few of them can capture the normal spatio-temporal patterns effectively and efficiently. Moreover, existing works seldom explicitly consider the local consistency at frame level and global coherence of temporal dynamics in video sequences. To this end, we propose Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks (CT-D2GAN) to perform unsupervised video anomaly detection. Specifically, we first present a convolutional transformer to perform future frame prediction. It contains three key components, i.e., a convolutional encoder to capture the spatial information of the input video clips, a temporal self-attention module to encode the temporal dynamics, and a convolutional decoder to integrate spatio-temporal features and predict the future frame. Next, a dual discriminator based adversarial training procedure, which jointly considers an image discriminator that can maintain the local consistency at frame-level and a video discriminator that can enforce the global coherence of temporal dynamics, is employed to enhance the future frame prediction. Finally, the prediction error is used to identify abnormal video frames. Thoroughly empirical studies on three public video anomaly detection datasets, i.e., UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and Shanghai Tech Campus, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adversarial spatio-temporal modeling framework.

We present adversarial flow models, a class of generative models that unifies adversarial models and flow models. Our method supports native one-step or multi-step generation and is trained using the adversarial objective. Unlike traditional GANs, where the generator learns an arbitrary transport plan between the noise and the data distributions, our generator learns a deterministic noise-to-data mapping, which is the same optimal transport as in flow-matching models. This significantly stabilizes adversarial training. Also, unlike consistency-based methods, our model directly learns one-step or few-step generation without needing to learn the intermediate timesteps of the probability flow for propagation. This saves model capacity, reduces training iterations, and avoids error accumulation. Under the same 1NFE setting on ImageNet-256px, our B/2 model approaches the performance of consistency-based XL/2 models, while our XL/2 model creates a new best FID of 2.38. We additionally show the possibility of end-to-end training of 56-layer and 112-layer models through depth repetition without any intermediate supervision, and achieve FIDs of 2.08 and 1.94 using a single forward pass, surpassing their 2NFE and 4NFE counterparts.

Radio-frequency coverage maps (RF maps) are extensively utilized in wireless networks for capacity planning, placement of access points and base stations, localization, and coverage estimation. Conducting site surveys to obtain RF maps is labor-intensive and sometimes not feasible. In this paper, we propose radio-frequency adversarial deep-learning inference for automated network coverage estimation (RADIANCE), a generative adversarial network (GAN) based approach for synthesizing RF maps in indoor scenarios. RADIANCE utilizes a semantic map, a high-level representation of the indoor environment to encode spatial relationships and attributes of objects within the environment and guide the RF map generation process. We introduce a new gradient-based loss function that computes the magnitude and direction of change in received signal strength (RSS) values from a point within the environment. RADIANCE incorporates this loss function along with the antenna pattern to capture signal propagation within a given indoor configuration and generate new patterns under new configuration, antenna (beam) pattern, and center frequency. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare RADIANCE with ray-tracing simulations of RF maps. Our results show that RADIANCE achieves a mean average error (MAE) of 0.09, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.29, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 10.78, and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) of 0.80.

Quantifying uncertainty is important for actionable predictions in real-world applications. A crucial part of predictive uncertainty quantification is the estimation of epistemic uncertainty, which is defined as an integral of the product between a divergence function and the posterior. Current methods such as Deep Ensembles or MC dropout underperform at estimating the epistemic uncertainty, since they primarily consider the posterior when sampling models. We suggest Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models (QUAM) to better estimate the epistemic uncertainty. QUAM identifies regions where the whole product under the integral is large, not just the posterior. Consequently, QUAM has lower approximation error of the epistemic uncertainty compared to previous methods. Models for which the product is large correspond to adversarial models (not adversarial examples!). Adversarial models have both a high posterior as well as a high divergence between their predictions and that of a reference model. Our experiments show that QUAM excels in capturing epistemic uncertainty for deep learning models and outperforms previous methods on challenging tasks in the vision domain.

As a research community, we are still lacking a systematic understanding of the progress on adversarial robustness which often makes it hard to identify the most promising ideas in training robust models. A key challenge in benchmarking robustness is that its evaluation is often error-prone leading to robustness overestimation. Our goal is to establish a standardized benchmark of adversarial robustness, which as accurately as possible reflects the robustness of the considered models within a reasonable computational budget. To this end, we start by considering the image classification task and introduce restrictions (possibly loosened in the future) on the allowed models. We evaluate adversarial robustness with AutoAttack, an ensemble of white- and black-box attacks, which was recently shown in a large-scale study to improve almost all robustness evaluations compared to the original publications. To prevent overadaptation of new defenses to AutoAttack, we welcome external evaluations based on adaptive attacks, especially where AutoAttack flags a potential overestimation of robustness. Our leaderboard, hosted at https://robustbench.github.io/, contains evaluations of 120+ models and aims at reflecting the current state of the art in image classification on a set of well-defined tasks in ell_infty- and ell_2-threat models and on common corruptions, with possible extensions in the future. Additionally, we open-source the library https://github.com/RobustBench/robustbench that provides unified access to 80+ robust models to facilitate their downstream applications. Finally, based on the collected models, we analyze the impact of robustness on the performance on distribution shifts, calibration, out-of-distribution detection, fairness, privacy leakage, smoothness, and transferability.

The pursuit of data efficiency, where quality outweighs quantity, has emerged as a cornerstone in robotic manipulation, especially given the high costs associated with real-world data collection. We propose that maximizing the informational density of individual demonstrations can dramatically reduce reliance on large-scale datasets while improving task performance. To this end, we introduce Adversarial Data Collection, a Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) framework that redefines robotic data acquisition through real-time, bidirectional human-environment interactions. Unlike conventional pipelines that passively record static demonstrations, ADC adopts a collaborative perturbation paradigm: during a single episode, an adversarial operator dynamically alters object states, environmental conditions, and linguistic commands, while the tele-operator adaptively adjusts actions to overcome these evolving challenges. This process compresses diverse failure-recovery behaviors, compositional task variations, and environmental perturbations into minimal demonstrations. Our experiments demonstrate that ADC-trained models achieve superior compositional generalization to unseen task instructions, enhanced robustness to perceptual perturbations, and emergent error recovery capabilities. Strikingly, models trained with merely 20% of the demonstration volume collected through ADC significantly outperform traditional approaches using full datasets. These advances bridge the gap between data-centric learning paradigms and practical robotic deployment, demonstrating that strategic data acquisition, not merely post-hoc processing, is critical for scalable, real-world robot learning. Additionally, we are curating a large-scale ADC-Robotics dataset comprising real-world manipulation tasks with adversarial perturbations. This benchmark will be open-sourced to facilitate advancements in robotic imitation learning.

We propose continuous adversarial flow models, a type of continuous-time flow model trained with an adversarial objective. Unlike flow matching, which uses a fixed mean-squared-error criterion, our approach introduces a learned discriminator to guide training. This change in objective induces a different generalized distribution, which empirically produces samples that are better aligned with the target data distribution. Our method is primarily proposed for post-training existing flow-matching models, although it can also train models from scratch. On the ImageNet 256px generation task, our post-training substantially improves the guidance-free FID of latent-space SiT from 8.26 to 3.63 and of pixel-space JiT from 7.17 to 3.57. It also improves guided generation, reducing FID from 2.06 to 1.53 for SiT and from 1.86 to 1.80 for JiT. We further evaluate our approach on text-to-image generation, where it achieves improved results on both the GenEval and DPG benchmarks.

Recent advancements in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) have been driven by transformer-based models. OCR systems are critical in numerous high-stakes domains, yet their vulnerability to adversarial attack remains largely uncharted territory, raising concerns about security and compliance with emerging AI regulations. In this work we present a novel framework to assess the resilience of Transformer-based OCR (TrOCR) models. We develop and assess algorithms for both targeted and untargeted attacks. For the untargeted case, we measure the Character Error Rate (CER), while for the targeted case we use the success ratio. We find that TrOCR is highly vulnerable to untargeted attacks and somewhat less vulnerable to targeted attacks. On a benchmark handwriting data set, untargeted attacks can cause a CER of more than 1 without being noticeable to the eye. With a similar perturbation size, targeted attacks can lead to success rates of around 25% -- here we attacked single tokens, requiring TrOCR to output the tenth most likely token from a large vocabulary.

Adversarial robustness has become a central goal in deep learning, both in the theory and the practice. However, successful methods to improve the adversarial robustness (such as adversarial training) greatly hurt generalization performance on the unperturbed data. This could have a major impact on how the adversarial robustness affects real world systems (i.e. many may opt to forego robustness if it can improve accuracy on the unperturbed data). We propose Interpolated Adversarial Training, which employs recently proposed interpolation based training methods in the framework of adversarial training. On CIFAR-10, adversarial training increases the standard test error (when there is no adversary) from 4.43% to 12.32%, whereas with our Interpolated adversarial training we retain the adversarial robustness while achieving a standard test error of only 6.45%. With our technique, the relative increase in the standard error for the robust model is reduced from 178.1% to just 45.5%. Moreover, we provide mathematical analysis of Interpolated Adversarial Training to confirm its efficiencies and demonstrate its advantages in terms of robustness and generalization.

Adversarial training is effective on balanced datasets, but its robustness degrades under longtailed class distributions, where tail classes suffer high robust error and unstable decision boundaries. We propose Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training (MCAT), a unified framework that enforces the semantic validity of adversarial examples by penalizing deviations from class-conditional manifolds in feature space, while promoting balanced geometric separation across classes via an ETF-inspired regularization. We provide theoretical results that link geometric separation to lower bounds on adversarially robust margins, and show that manifold-constrained adversarial risk upperbounds robust risk on high-density semantic regions. Extensive experiments on standard longtailed benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in overall, balanced, and tail-class adversarial robustness.

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the rewards are sampled stochastically. Therefore, we ask: Can we design a learner that performs optimally in both the stochastic and adversarial problems while not being aware of the nature of the rewards? First, we show that designing such a learner is impossible in general. In particular, to be robust to adversarial rewards, we can only guarantee optimal rates of error on a subset of the stochastic problems. We give a lower bound that characterizes the optimal rate in stochastic problems if the strategy is constrained to be robust to adversarial rewards. Finally, we design a simple parameter-free algorithm and show that its probability of error matches (up to log factors) the lower bound in stochastic problems, and it is also robust to adversarial ones.

Adversarial Collaborative Filtering (ACF), which typically applies adversarial perturbations at user and item embeddings through adversarial training, is widely recognized as an effective strategy for enhancing the robustness of Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems against poisoning attacks. Besides, numerous studies have empirically shown that ACF can also improve recommendation performance compared to traditional CF. Despite these empirical successes, the theoretical understanding of ACF's effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness remains unclear. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first theoretically show that ACF can achieve a lower recommendation error compared to traditional CF with the same training epochs in both clean and poisoned data contexts. Furthermore, by establishing bounds for reductions in recommendation error during ACF's optimization process, we find that applying personalized magnitudes of perturbation for different users based on their embedding scales can further improve ACF's effectiveness. Building on these theoretical understandings, we propose Personalized Magnitude Adversarial Collaborative Filtering (PamaCF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that PamaCF effectively defends against various types of poisoning attacks while significantly enhancing recommendation performance.

Visual localization, which estimates a camera's pose within a known scene, is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems. While absolute pose regression (APR) methods have shown promise for efficient inference, they often struggle with generalization. Recent approaches attempt to address this through data augmentation with varied viewpoints, yet they overlook a critical factor: appearance diversity. In this work, we identify appearance variation as the key to robust localization. Specifically, we first lift real 2D images into 3D Gaussian Splats with varying appearance and deblurring ability, enabling the synthesis of diverse training data that varies not just in poses but also in environmental conditions such as lighting and weather. To fully unleash the potential of the appearance-diverse data, we build a two-branch joint training pipeline with an adversarial discriminator to bridge the syn-to-real gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, reducing translation and rotation errors by 50\% and 41\% on indoor datasets, and 38\% and 44\% on outdoor datasets. Most notably, our method shows remarkable robustness in dynamic driving scenarios under varying weather conditions and in day-to-night scenarios, where previous APR methods fail. Project Page: https://ai4ce.github.io/RAP/

While neural networks allow highly accurate predictions in many tasks, their lack of robustness towards even slight input perturbations often hampers their deployment. Adversarial attacks such as the seminal projected gradient descent (PGD) offer an effective means to evaluate a model's robustness and dedicated solutions have been proposed for attacks on semantic segmentation or optical flow estimation. While they attempt to increase the attack's efficiency, a further objective is to balance its effect, so that it acts on the entire image domain instead of isolated point-wise predictions. This often comes at the cost of optimization stability and thus efficiency. Here, we propose CosPGD, an attack that encourages more balanced errors over the entire image domain while increasing the attack's overall efficiency. To this end, CosPGD leverages a simple alignment score computed from any pixel-wise prediction and its target to scale the loss in a smooth and fully differentiable way. It leads to efficient evaluations of a model's robustness for semantic segmentation as well as regression models (such as optical flow, disparity estimation, or image restoration), and it allows it to outperform the previous SotA attack on semantic segmentation. We provide code for the CosPGD algorithm and example usage at https://github.com/shashankskagnihotri/cospgd.

Large language models (LLMs) with explicit reasoning capabilities excel at mathematical reasoning yet still commit process errors, such as incorrect calculations, brittle logic, and superficially plausible but invalid steps. In this paper, we introduce Generative Adversarial Reasoner, an on-policy joint training framework designed to enhance reasoning by co-evolving an LLM reasoner and an LLM-based discriminator through adversarial reinforcement learning. A compute-efficient review schedule partitions each reasoning chain into logically complete slices of comparable length, and the discriminator evaluates each slice's soundness with concise, structured justifications. Learning couples complementary signals: the LLM reasoner is rewarded for logically consistent steps that yield correct answers, while the discriminator earns rewards for correctly detecting errors or distinguishing traces in the reasoning process. This produces dense, well-calibrated, on-policy step-level rewards that supplement sparse exact-match signals, improving credit assignment, increasing sample efficiency, and enhancing overall reasoning quality of LLMs. Across various mathematical benchmarks, the method delivers consistent gains over strong baselines with standard RL post-training. Specifically, on AIME24, we improve DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B from 54.0 to 61.3 (+7.3) and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B from 43.7 to 53.7 (+10.0). The modular discriminator also enables flexible reward shaping for objectives such as teacher distillation, preference alignment, and mathematical proof-based reasoning.

Despite excellent average-case performance of many image classifiers, their performance can substantially deteriorate on semantically coherent subgroups of the data that were under-represented in the training data. These systematic errors can impact both fairness for demographic minority groups as well as robustness and safety under domain shift. A major challenge is to identify such subgroups with subpar performance when the subgroups are not annotated and their occurrence is very rare. We leverage recent advances in text-to-image models and search in the space of textual descriptions of subgroups ("prompts") for subgroups where the target model has low performance on the prompt-conditioned synthesized data. To tackle the exponentially growing number of subgroups, we employ combinatorial testing. We denote this procedure as PromptAttack as it can be interpreted as an adversarial attack in a prompt space. We study subgroup coverage and identifiability with PromptAttack in a controlled setting and find that it identifies systematic errors with high accuracy. Thereupon, we apply PromptAttack to ImageNet classifiers and identify novel systematic errors on rare subgroups.

Discrete adversarial attacks are symbolic perturbations to a language input that preserve the output label but lead to a prediction error. While such attacks have been extensively explored for the purpose of evaluating model robustness, their utility for improving robustness has been limited to offline augmentation only. Concretely, given a trained model, attacks are used to generate perturbed (adversarial) examples, and the model is re-trained exactly once. In this work, we address this gap and leverage discrete attacks for online augmentation, where adversarial examples are generated at every training step, adapting to the changing nature of the model. We propose (i) a new discrete attack, based on best-first search, and (ii) random sampling attacks that unlike prior work are not based on expensive search-based procedures. Surprisingly, we find that random sampling leads to impressive gains in robustness, outperforming the commonly-used offline augmentation, while leading to a speedup at training time of ~10x. Furthermore, online augmentation with search-based attacks justifies the higher training cost, significantly improving robustness on three datasets. Last, we show that our new attack substantially improves robustness compared to prior methods.

Time series anomalies can offer information relevant to critical situations facing various fields, from finance and aerospace to the IT, security, and medical domains. However, detecting anomalies in time series data is particularly challenging due to the vague definition of anomalies and said data's frequent lack of labels and highly complex temporal correlations. Current state-of-the-art unsupervised machine learning methods for anomaly detection suffer from scalability and portability issues, and may have high false positive rates. In this paper, we propose TadGAN, an unsupervised anomaly detection approach built on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). To capture the temporal correlations of time series distributions, we use LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks as base models for Generators and Critics. TadGAN is trained with cycle consistency loss to allow for effective time-series data reconstruction. We further propose several novel methods to compute reconstruction errors, as well as different approaches to combine reconstruction errors and Critic outputs to compute anomaly scores. To demonstrate the performance and generalizability of our approach, we test several anomaly scoring techniques and report the best-suited one. We compare our approach to 8 baseline anomaly detection methods on 11 datasets from multiple reputable sources such as NASA, Yahoo, Numenta, Amazon, and Twitter. The results show that our approach can effectively detect anomalies and outperform baseline methods in most cases (6 out of 11). Notably, our method has the highest averaged F1 score across all the datasets. Our code is open source and is available as a benchmarking tool.

Deep neural networks coupled with fast simulation and improved computation have led to recent successes in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, most current RL-based approaches fail to generalize since: (a) the gap between simulation and real world is so large that policy-learning approaches fail to transfer; (b) even if policy learning is done in real world, the data scarcity leads to failed generalization from training to test scenarios (e.g., due to different friction or object masses). Inspired from H-infinity control methods, we note that both modeling errors and differences in training and test scenarios can be viewed as extra forces/disturbances in the system. This paper proposes the idea of robust adversarial reinforcement learning (RARL), where we train an agent to operate in the presence of a destabilizing adversary that applies disturbance forces to the system. The jointly trained adversary is reinforced -- that is, it learns an optimal destabilization policy. We formulate the policy learning as a zero-sum, minimax objective function. Extensive experiments in multiple environments (InvertedPendulum, HalfCheetah, Swimmer, Hopper and Walker2d) conclusively demonstrate that our method (a) improves training stability; (b) is robust to differences in training/test conditions; and c) outperform the baseline even in the absence of the adversary.

Existing large-scale video generation models are computationally intensive, preventing adoption in real-time and interactive applications. In this work, we propose autoregressive adversarial post-training (AAPT) to transform a pre-trained latent video diffusion model into a real-time, interactive video generator. Our model autoregressively generates a latent frame at a time using a single neural function evaluation (1NFE). The model can stream the result to the user in real time and receive interactive responses as controls to generate the next latent frame. Unlike existing approaches, our method explores adversarial training as an effective paradigm for autoregressive generation. This not only allows us to design an architecture that is more efficient for one-step generation while fully utilizing the KV cache, but also enables training the model in a student-forcing manner that proves to be effective in reducing error accumulation during long video generation. Our experiments demonstrate that our 8B model achieves real-time, 24fps, streaming video generation at 736x416 resolution on a single H100, or 1280x720 on 8xH100 up to a minute long (1440 frames). Visit our research website at https://seaweed-apt.com/2

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically evaluated for safety under single-shot or low-budget adversarial prompting, which underestimates real-world risk. In practice, attackers can exploit large-scale parallel sampling to repeatedly probe a model until a harmful response is produced. While recent work shows that attack success increases with repeated sampling, principled methods for predicting large-scale adversarial risk remain limited. We propose a scaling-aware Best-of-N estimation of risk, SABER, for modeling jailbreak vulnerability under Best-of-N sampling. We model sample-level success probabilities using a Beta distribution, the conjugate prior of the Bernoulli distribution, and derive an analytic scaling law that enables reliable extrapolation of large-N attack success rates from small-budget measurements. Using only n=100 samples, our anchored estimator predicts ASR@1000 with a mean absolute error of 1.66, compared to 12.04 for the baseline, which is an 86.2% reduction in estimation error. Our results reveal heterogeneous risk scaling profiles and show that models appearing robust under standard evaluation can experience rapid nonlinear risk amplification under parallel adversarial pressure. This work provides a low-cost, scalable methodology for realistic LLM safety assessment. We will release our code and evaluation scripts upon publication to future research.

Evaluating the step-by-step reliability of large language model (LLM) reasoning, such as Chain-of-Thought, remains challenging due to the difficulty and cost of obtaining high-quality step-level supervision. In this paper, we introduce Self-Play Critic (SPC), a novel approach where a critic model evolves its ability to assess reasoning steps through adversarial self-play games, eliminating the need for manual step-level annotation. SPC involves fine-tuning two copies of a base model to play two roles, namely a "sneaky generator" that deliberately produces erroneous steps designed to be difficult to detect, and a "critic" that analyzes the correctness of reasoning steps. These two models engage in an adversarial game in which the generator aims to fool the critic, while the critic model seeks to identify the generator's errors. Using reinforcement learning based on the game outcomes, the models iteratively improve; the winner of each confrontation receives a positive reward and the loser receives a negative reward, driving continuous self-evolution. Experiments on three reasoning process benchmarks (ProcessBench, PRM800K, DeltaBench) demonstrate that our SPC progressively enhances its error detection capabilities (e.g., accuracy increases from 70.8% to 77.7% on ProcessBench) and surpasses strong baselines, including distilled R1 model. Furthermore, applying SPC to guide the test-time search of diverse LLMs significantly improves their mathematical reasoning performance on MATH500 and AIME2024, outperforming state-of-the-art process reward models.

Open-ended generation tasks require outputs to satisfy diverse and often implicit task-specific evaluation rubrics. The sheer number of relevant rubrics leads to prohibitively high verification costs and incomplete assessments of a response, making reinforcement learning (RL) post-training with rubric-based rewards difficult to scale. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that often the best way to combine these rubrics into one single reward is also highly prompt-specific. We propose Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Critic (RLAC), a post-training approach that addresses these challenges via dynamic rubric verification. Our approach employs a large language model (LLM) as a critic that dynamically identifies only the most likely failure modes (e.g., a factual error or unhandled edge case), which are then verified by an external validator to optimize both generator and critic jointly. By training both the generator and the critic, this game enhances the critic's error detection and the generator's output quality while reducing required verifications. Our experiments demonstrate that RLAC improves factual accuracy in text generation and correctness in code generation, while also outperforming exhaustive verification and reward model methods. We show that dynamic critics are more effective than fixed critics, showcasing the potential of RLAC for scaling RL post-training to free-form generation tasks.

It has been well recognized that neural network based image classifiers are easily fooled by images with tiny perturbations crafted by an adversary. There has been a vast volume of research to generate and defend such adversarial attacks. However, the following problem is left unexplored: How to reverse-engineer adversarial perturbations from an adversarial image? This leads to a new adversarial learning paradigm--Reverse Engineering of Deceptions (RED). If successful, RED allows us to estimate adversarial perturbations and recover the original images. However, carefully crafted, tiny adversarial perturbations are difficult to recover by optimizing a unilateral RED objective. For example, the pure image denoising method may overfit to minimizing the reconstruction error but hardly preserve the classification properties of the true adversarial perturbations. To tackle this challenge, we formalize the RED problem and identify a set of principles crucial to the RED approach design. Particularly, we find that prediction alignment and proper data augmentation (in terms of spatial transformations) are two criteria to achieve a generalizable RED approach. By integrating these RED principles with image denoising, we propose a new Class-Discriminative Denoising based RED framework, termed CDD-RED. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CDD-RED under different evaluation metrics (ranging from the pixel-level, prediction-level to the attribution-level alignment) and a variety of attack generation methods (e.g., FGSM, PGD, CW, AutoAttack, and adaptive attacks).

Several machine learning models, including neural networks, consistently misclassify adversarial examples---inputs formed by applying small but intentionally worst-case perturbations to examples from the dataset, such that the perturbed input results in the model outputting an incorrect answer with high confidence. Early attempts at explaining this phenomenon focused on nonlinearity and overfitting. We argue instead that the primary cause of neural networks' vulnerability to adversarial perturbation is their linear nature. This explanation is supported by new quantitative results while giving the first explanation of the most intriguing fact about them: their generalization across architectures and training sets. Moreover, this view yields a simple and fast method of generating adversarial examples. Using this approach to provide examples for adversarial training, we reduce the test set error of a maxout network on the MNIST dataset.

Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.

Vision-language models are increasingly integrated into clinical workflows. However, existing benchmarks primarily assess performance on common anatomical presentations and fail to capture the challenges posed by rare variants. To address this gap, we introduce AdversarialAnatomyBench, the first benchmark comprising naturally occurring rare anatomical variants across diverse imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We call such variants that violate learned priors about "typical" human anatomy natural adversarial anatomy. Benchmarking 22 state-of-the-art VLMs with AdversarialAnatomyBench yielded three key insights. First, when queried with basic medical perception tasks, mean accuracy dropped from 74% on typical to 29% on atypical anatomy. Even the best-performing models, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Llama 4 Maverick, showed performance drops of 41-51%. Second, model errors closely mirrored expected anatomical biases. Third, neither model scaling nor interventions, including bias-aware prompting and test-time reasoning, resolved these issues. These findings highlight a critical and previously unquantified limitation in current VLM: their poor generalization to rare anatomical presentations. AdversarialAnatomyBench provides a foundation for systematically measuring and mitigating anatomical bias in multimodal medical AI systems.

The SWE-Bench Verified leaderboard is approaching saturation, with the top system achieving 78.80%. However, we show that this performance is inflated. Our re-evaluation reveals that one in five "solved" patches from the top-30 agents are semantically incorrect, passing only because weak test suites fail to expose their errors. We present SWE-ABS, an adversarial framework that strengthens test suites through a two-stage pipeline: (1) coverage-driven augmentation using program slicing to target untested code regions, and (2) mutation-driven adversarial testing that synthesizes plausible but incorrect patches to expose semantic blind spots. On SWE-Bench Verified (500 instances), SWE-ABS strengthens 50.2% of instances, a 25.1x improvement over prior work, and rejects 19.71% of previously passing patches. As a result, the top agent's score decreases from 78.80% to 62.20%, leading to significant leaderboard reshuffling, with the previous top-ranked agent dropping to fifth place.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), an instance-agnostic perturbation capable of fooling the target model for most samples. Compared to instance-specific adversarial examples, UAP is more challenging as it needs to generalize across various samples and models. In this paper, we examine the serious dilemma of UAP generation methods from a generalization perspective -- the gradient vanishing problem using small-batch stochastic gradient optimization and the local optima problem using large-batch optimization. To address these problems, we propose a simple and effective method called Stochastic Gradient Aggregation (SGA), which alleviates the gradient vanishing and escapes from poor local optima at the same time. Specifically, SGA employs the small-batch training to perform multiple iterations of inner pre-search. Then, all the inner gradients are aggregated as a one-step gradient estimation to enhance the gradient stability and reduce quantization errors. Extensive experiments on the standard ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the generalization ability of UAP and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/liuxuannan/Stochastic-Gradient-Aggregation.

We present the OMG-CMDP! algorithm for regret minimization in adversarial Contextual MDPs. The algorithm operates under the minimal assumptions of realizable function class and access to online least squares and log loss regression oracles. Our algorithm is efficient (assuming efficient online regression oracles), simple and robust to approximation errors. It enjoys an O(H^{2.5} T|S||A| ( mathcal{R(O) + H log(delta^{-1}) )}) regret guarantee, with T being the number of episodes, S the state space, A the action space, H the horizon and R(O) = R(O_{sq}^F) + R(O_{log}^P) is the sum of the regression oracles' regret, used to approximate the context-dependent rewards and dynamics, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first efficient rate optimal regret minimization algorithm for adversarial CMDPs that operates under the minimal standard assumption of online function approximation.

Recent hybrid video generation models combine autoregressive temporal dynamics with diffusion-based spatial denoising, but their sequential, iterative nature leads to error accumulation and long inference times. In this work, we propose a distillation-based framework for efficient causal video generation that enables high-quality synthesis with extremely limited denoising steps. Our approach builds upon the Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) framework and proposes a novel Adversarial Self-Distillation (ASD) strategy, which aligns the outputs of the student model's n-step denoising process with its (n+1)-step version at the distribution level. This design provides smoother supervision by bridging small intra-student gaps and more informative guidance by combining teacher knowledge with locally consistent student behavior, substantially improving training stability and generation quality in extremely few-step scenarios (e.g., 1-2 steps). In addition, we present a First-Frame Enhancement (FFE) strategy, which allocates more denoising steps to the initial frames to mitigate error propagation while applying larger skipping steps to later frames. Extensive experiments on VBench demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in both one-step and two-step video generation. Notably, our framework produces a single distilled model that flexibly supports multiple inference-step settings, eliminating the need for repeated re-distillation and enabling efficient, high-quality video synthesis.

While pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems demonstrate impressive performance on matched domains, their performance often degrades when confronted with channel mismatch stemming from unseen recording environments and conditions. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel channel-aware data simulation method for robust ASR training. Our method harnesses the synergistic power of channel-extractive techniques and generative adversarial networks (GANs). We first train a channel encoder capable of extracting embeddings from arbitrary audio. On top of this, channel embeddings are extracted using a minimal amount of target-domain data and used to guide a GAN-based speech synthesizer. This synthesizer generates speech that faithfully preserves the phonetic content of the input while mimicking the channel characteristics of the target domain. We evaluate our method on the challenging Hakka Across Taiwan (HAT) and Taiwanese Across Taiwan (TAT) corpora, achieving relative character error rate (CER) reductions of 20.02% and 9.64%, respectively, compared to the baselines. These results highlight the efficacy of our channel-aware data simulation method for bridging the gap between source- and target-domain acoustics.

This study probes the vulnerabilities of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (c-MARL) under adversarial attacks, a critical determinant of c-MARL's worst-case performance prior to real-world implementation. Current observation-based attacks, constrained by white-box assumptions, overlook c-MARL's complex multi-agent interactions and cooperative objectives, resulting in impractical and limited attack capabilities. To address these shortcomes, we propose Adversarial Minority Influence (AMI), a practical and strong for c-MARL. AMI is a practical black-box attack and can be launched without knowing victim parameters. AMI is also strong by considering the complex multi-agent interaction and the cooperative goal of agents, enabling a single adversarial agent to unilaterally misleads majority victims to form targeted worst-case cooperation. This mirrors minority influence phenomena in social psychology. To achieve maximum deviation in victim policies under complex agent-wise interactions, our unilateral attack aims to characterize and maximize the impact of the adversary on the victims. This is achieved by adapting a unilateral agent-wise relation metric derived from mutual information, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of victim influence on the adversary. To lead the victims into a jointly detrimental scenario, our targeted attack deceives victims into a long-term, cooperatively harmful situation by guiding each victim towards a specific target, determined through a trial-and-error process executed by a reinforcement learning agent. Through AMI, we achieve the first successful attack against real-world robot swarms and effectively fool agents in simulated environments into collectively worst-case scenarios, including Starcraft II and Multi-agent Mujoco. The source code and demonstrations can be found at: https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/AMI.

While deep learning-based methods for blind face restoration have achieved unprecedented success, they still suffer from two major limitations. First, most of them deteriorate when facing complex degradations out of their training data. Second, these methods require multiple constraints, e.g., fidelity, perceptual, and adversarial losses, which require laborious hyper-parameter tuning to stabilize and balance their influences. In this work, we propose a novel method named DifFace that is capable of coping with unseen and complex degradations more gracefully without complicated loss designs. The key of our method is to establish a posterior distribution from the observed low-quality (LQ) image to its high-quality (HQ) counterpart. In particular, we design a transition distribution from the LQ image to the intermediate state of a pre-trained diffusion model and then gradually transmit from this intermediate state to the HQ target by recursively applying a pre-trained diffusion model. The transition distribution only relies on a restoration backbone that is trained with L_2 loss on some synthetic data, which favorably avoids the cumbersome training process in existing methods. Moreover, the transition distribution can contract the error of the restoration backbone and thus makes our method more robust to unknown degradations. Comprehensive experiments show that DifFace is superior to current state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases with severe degradations. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/DifFace.

We introduce NESSiE, the NEceSsary SafEty benchmark for large language models (LLMs). With minimal test cases of information and access security, NESSiE reveals safety-relevant failures that should not exist, given the low complexity of the tasks. NESSiE is intended as a lightweight, easy-to-use sanity check for language model safety and, as such, is not sufficient for guaranteeing safety in general -- but we argue that passing this test is necessary for any deployment. However, even state-of-the-art LLMs do not reach 100% on NESSiE and thus fail our necessary condition of language model safety, even in the absence of adversarial attacks. Our Safe & Helpful (SH) metric allows for direct comparison of the two requirements, showing models are biased toward being helpful rather than safe. We further find that disabled reasoning for some models, but especially a benign distraction context degrade model performance. Overall, our results underscore the critical risks of deploying such models as autonomous agents in the wild. We make the dataset, package and plotting code publicly available.

The advancement of high-performance computing has enabled the generation of large direct numerical simulation (DNS) datasets of turbulent flows, driving the need for efficient compression/decompression techniques that reduce storage demands while maintaining fidelity. Traditional methods, such as the discrete wavelet transform, cannot achieve compression ratios of 8 or higher for complex turbulent flows without introducing significant encoding/decoding errors. On the other hand, a super-resolution-based generative adversarial network (SR-GAN), called ZipGAN, can accurately reconstruct fine-scale features, preserving velocity gradients and structural details, even at a compression ratio of 512, thanks to the more efficient representation of the data in compact latent space. Additional benefits are ascribed to adversarial training. The high GAN training time is significantly reduced with a progressive transfer learning approach and, once trained, they can be applied independently of the Reynolds number. It is demonstrated that ZipGAN can enhance dataset temporal resolution without additional simulation overhead by generating high-quality intermediate fields from compressed snapshots. The ZipGAN discriminator can reliably evaluate the quality of decoded fields, ensuring fidelity even in the absence of original DNS fields. Hence, ZipGAN compression/decompression method presents a highly efficient and scalable alternative for large-scale DNS storage and transfer, offering substantial advantages over the DWT methods in terms of compression efficiency, reconstruction fidelity, and temporal resolution enhancement.

Physical adversarial attacks threaten to fool object detection systems, but reproducible research on the real-world effectiveness of physical patches and how to defend against them requires a publicly available benchmark dataset. We present APRICOT, a collection of over 1,000 annotated photographs of printed adversarial patches in public locations. The patches target several object categories for three COCO-trained detection models, and the photos represent natural variation in position, distance, lighting conditions, and viewing angle. Our analysis suggests that maintaining adversarial robustness in uncontrolled settings is highly challenging, but it is still possible to produce targeted detections under white-box and sometimes black-box settings. We establish baselines for defending against adversarial patches through several methods, including a detector supervised with synthetic data and unsupervised methods such as kernel density estimation, Bayesian uncertainty, and reconstruction error. Our results suggest that adversarial patches can be effectively flagged, both in a high-knowledge, attack-specific scenario, and in an unsupervised setting where patches are detected as anomalies in natural images. This dataset and the described experiments provide a benchmark for future research on the effectiveness of and defenses against physical adversarial objects in the wild.

Autonomous LLM agents require structured long-term memory, yet current "append-and-evolve" systems like A-MEM face O(N^2) write-latency and excessive token costs. We introduce D-MEM (Dopamine-Gated Agentic Memory), a biologically inspired architecture that decouples short-term interaction from cognitive restructuring via a Fast/Slow routing system based on Reward Prediction Error (RPE). A lightweight Critic Router evaluates stimuli for Surprise and Utility. Routine, low-RPE inputs are bypassed or cached in an O(1) fast-access buffer. Conversely, high-RPE inputs, such as factual contradictions or preference shifts, trigger a "dopamine" signal, activating the O(N) memory evolution pipeline to reshape the agent's knowledge graph. To evaluate performance under realistic conditions, we introduce the LoCoMo-Noise benchmark, which injects controlled conversational noise into long-term sessions. Evaluations demonstrate that D-MEM reduces token consumption by over 80%, eliminates O(N^2) bottlenecks, and outperforms baselines in multi-hop reasoning and adversarial resilience. By selectively gating cognitive restructuring, D-MEM provides a scalable, cost-efficient foundation for lifelong agentic memory.

As frontier AI models are deployed in high-stakes decision pipelines, their ability to maintain metacognitive stability -- knowing what they do not know, detecting errors, seeking clarification -- under adversarial pressure is a critical safety requirement. Current safety evaluations focus on detecting strategic deception (scheming); we investigate a more fundamental failure mode: cognitive collapse. We present SCHEMA, an evaluation of 11 frontier models from 8 vendors across 67,221 scored records using a 6-condition factorial design with dual-classifier scoring. We find that 8 of 11 models suffer catastrophic metacognitive degradation under adversarial pressure, with accuracy dropping by up to 30.2 percentage points (all p < 2 times 10^{-8}, surviving Bonferroni correction). Crucially, we identify a "Compliance Trap": through factorial isolation and a benign distraction control, we demonstrate that collapse is driven not by the psychological content of survival threats, but by compliance-forcing instructions that override epistemic boundaries. Removing the compliance suffix restores performance even under active threat. Models with advanced reasoning capabilities exhibit the most severe absolute degradation, while Anthropic's Constitutional AI demonstrates near-perfect immunity -- not from superior capability (Google's Gemini matches its baseline accuracy) but from alignment-specific training. We release the complete dataset and evaluation infrastructure.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) that interact with real computer systems can perform automated tasks but face critical safety risks. Ambiguous instructions may trigger harmful actions, and adversarial users can manipulate tool execution to achieve malicious goals. Existing benchmarks mostly focus on short-horizon or GUI-based tasks, evaluating on execution-time errors but overlooking the ability to anticipate planning-time risks. To fill this gap, we present LPS-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates the planning-time safety awareness of MCP-based CUAs under long-horizon tasks, covering both benign and adversarial interactions across 65 scenarios of 7 task domains and 9 risk types. We introduce a multi-agent automated pipeline for scalable data generation and adopt an LLM-as-a-judge evaluation protocol to assess safety awareness through the planning trajectory. Experiments reveal substantial deficiencies in existing CUAs' ability to maintain safe behavior. We further analyze the risks and propose mitigation strategies to improve long-horizon planning safety in MCP-based CUA systems. We open-source our code at https://github.com/tychenn/LPS-Bench.

The rapid advancement of AI has enabled highly realistic speech synthesis and voice cloning, posing serious risks to voice authentication, smart assistants, and telecom security. While most prior work frames spoof detection as a binary task, real-world attacks often involve hybrid utterances that mix genuine and synthetic speech, making detection substantially more challenging. To address this gap, we introduce the Hybrid Spoofed Audio Dataset (HSAD), a benchmark containing 1,248 clean and 41,044 degraded utterances across four classes: human, cloned, zero-shot AI-generated, and hybrid audio. Each sample is annotated with spoofing method, speaker identity, and degradation metadata to enable fine-grained analysis. We evaluate six transformer-based models, including spectrogram encoders (MIT-AST, MattyB95-AST) and self-supervised waveform models (Wav2Vec2, HuBERT). Results reveal critical lessons: pretrained models overgeneralize and collapse under hybrid conditions; spoof-specific fine-tuning improves separability but struggles with unseen compositions; and dataset-specific adaptation on HSAD yields large performance gains (AST greater than 97 percent and F1 score is approximately 99 percent), though residual errors persist for complex hybrids. These findings demonstrate that fine-tuning alone is not sufficient-robust hybrid-aware benchmarks like HSAD are essential to expose calibration failures, model biases, and factors affecting spoof detection in adversarial environments. HSAD thus provides both a dataset and an analytic framework for building resilient and trustworthy voice authentication systems.

We give the first efficient algorithm for learning halfspaces in the testable learning model recently defined by Rubinfeld and Vasilyan (2023). In this model, a learner certifies that the accuracy of its output hypothesis is near optimal whenever the training set passes an associated test, and training sets drawn from some target distribution -- e.g., the Gaussian -- must pass the test. This model is more challenging than distribution-specific agnostic or Massart noise models where the learner is allowed to fail arbitrarily if the distributional assumption does not hold. We consider the setting where the target distribution is Gaussian (or more generally any strongly log-concave distribution) in d dimensions and the noise model is either Massart or adversarial (agnostic). For Massart noise, our tester-learner runs in polynomial time and outputs a hypothesis with (information-theoretically optimal) error opt + epsilon for any strongly log-concave target distribution. For adversarial noise, our tester-learner obtains error O(opt) + epsilon in polynomial time when the target distribution is Gaussian; for strongly log-concave distributions, we obtain O(opt) + epsilon in quasipolynomial time. Prior work on testable learning ignores the labels in the training set and checks that the empirical moments of the covariates are close to the moments of the base distribution. Here we develop new tests of independent interest that make critical use of the labels and combine them with the moment-matching approach of Gollakota et al. (2023). This enables us to simulate a variant of the algorithm of Diakonikolas et al. (2020) for learning noisy halfspaces using nonconvex SGD but in the testable learning setting.

Recent work has demonstrated that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples---inputs that are almost indistinguishable from natural data and yet classified incorrectly by the network. In fact, some of the latest findings suggest that the existence of adversarial attacks may be an inherent weakness of deep learning models. To address this problem, we study the adversarial robustness of neural networks through the lens of robust optimization. This approach provides us with a broad and unifying view on much of the prior work on this topic. Its principled nature also enables us to identify methods for both training and attacking neural networks that are reliable and, in a certain sense, universal. In particular, they specify a concrete security guarantee that would protect against any adversary. These methods let us train networks with significantly improved resistance to a wide range of adversarial attacks. They also suggest the notion of security against a first-order adversary as a natural and broad security guarantee. We believe that robustness against such well-defined classes of adversaries is an important stepping stone towards fully resistant deep learning models. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/MadryLab/mnist_challenge and https://github.com/MadryLab/cifar10_challenge.

The trade-off between robustness and accuracy has been widely studied in the adversarial literature. Although still controversial, the prevailing view is that this trade-off is inherent, either empirically or theoretically. Thus, we dig for the origin of this trade-off in adversarial training and find that it may stem from the improperly defined robust error, which imposes an inductive bias of local invariance -- an overcorrection towards smoothness. Given this, we advocate employing local equivariance to describe the ideal behavior of a robust model, leading to a self-consistent robust error named SCORE. By definition, SCORE facilitates the reconciliation between robustness and accuracy, while still handling the worst-case uncertainty via robust optimization. By simply substituting KL divergence with variants of distance metrics, SCORE can be efficiently minimized. Empirically, our models achieve top-rank performance on RobustBench under AutoAttack. Besides, SCORE provides instructive insights for explaining the overfitting phenomenon and semantic input gradients observed on robust models. Code is available at https://github.com/P2333/SCORE.

We study the problem of learning a single neuron with respect to the L_2^2-loss in the presence of adversarial label noise. We give an efficient algorithm that, for a broad family of activations including ReLUs, approximates the optimal L_2^2-error within a constant factor. Our algorithm applies under much milder distributional assumptions compared to prior work. The key ingredient enabling our results is a novel connection to local error bounds from optimization theory.

State of the art deep generative networks are capable of producing images with such incredible realism that they can be suspected of memorizing training images. It is why it is not uncommon to include visualizations of training set nearest neighbors, to suggest generated images are not simply memorized. We demonstrate this is not sufficient and motivates the need to study memorization/overfitting of deep generators with more scrutiny. This paper addresses this question by i) showing how simple losses are highly effective at reconstructing images for deep generators ii) analyzing the statistics of reconstruction errors when reconstructing training and validation images, which is the standard way to analyze overfitting in machine learning. Using this methodology, this paper shows that overfitting is not detectable in the pure GAN models proposed in the literature, in contrast with those using hybrid adversarial losses, which are amongst the most widely applied generative methods. The paper also shows that standard GAN evaluation metrics fail to capture memorization for some deep generators. Finally, the paper also shows how off-the-shelf GAN generators can be successfully applied to face inpainting and face super-resolution using the proposed reconstruction method, without hybrid adversarial losses.

The ubiquity of distributed machine learning (ML) in sensitive public domain applications calls for algorithms that protect data privacy, while being robust to faults and adversarial behaviors. Although privacy and robustness have been extensively studied independently in distributed ML, their synthesis remains poorly understood. We present the first tight analysis of the error incurred by any algorithm ensuring robustness against a fraction of adversarial machines, as well as differential privacy (DP) for honest machines' data against any other curious entity. Our analysis exhibits a fundamental trade-off between privacy, robustness, and utility. To prove our lower bound, we consider the case of mean estimation, subject to distributed DP and robustness constraints, and devise reductions to centralized estimation of one-way marginals. We prove our matching upper bound by presenting a new distributed ML algorithm using a high-dimensional robust aggregation rule. The latter amortizes the dependence on the dimension in the error (caused by adversarial workers and DP), while being agnostic to the statistical properties of the data.

Large Language Models for code generation frequently produce hallucinations in Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) tasks -- plausible but incorrect completions such as invented API methods, invalid parameters, undefined variables, or non-existent imports. These failures pass superficial review yet introduce runtime errors. We introduce Delulu, a verified multi-lingual benchmark of 1,951 FIM samples across 7 languages and 4 hallucination types. Samples are curated through an adversarial pipeline: a frontier LLM generates plausible hallucinations, four diverse judge models evaluate them, embedding-based clustering mines progressively harder examples, self-contained Docker containers verify that golden completions compile while hallucinated variants produce the expected runtime error, and a final human-expert review removes any remaining biased or trivially decidable samples. We evaluate 11 open-weight FIM models from five families spanning 0.5B-32B parameters: a six-point Qwen2.5-Coder scaling slate, plus a cross-family slate (CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, StarCoder2). The strongest model reaches only 84.5% pass@1, no family exceeds 0.77 Edit Similarity, and every family produces hallucination-aligned completions on a non-trivial share of samples, confirming that the difficulty exposed by Delulu is task-intrinsic rather than family-specific. We release the benchmark, containers, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/microsoft/delulu.

LLM-based software engineering agents are increasingly used in real-world development tasks, often with access to sensitive data or security-critical codebases. Such agents could intentionally sabotage these codebases if they were misaligned. We investigate asynchronous monitoring, in which a monitoring system reviews agent actions after the fact. Unlike synchronous monitoring, this approach does not impose runtime latency, while still attempting to disrupt attacks before irreversible harm occurs. We treat monitor development as an adversarial game between a blue team (who design monitors) and a red team (who create sabotaging agents). We attempt to set the game rules such that they upper bound the sabotage potential of an agent based on Claude 4.1 Opus. To ground this game in a realistic, high-stakes deployment scenario, we develop a suite of 5 diverse software engineering environments that simulate tasks that an agent might perform within an AI developer's internal infrastructure. Over the course of the game, we develop an ensemble monitor that achieves a 6% false negative rate at 1% false positive rate on a held out test environment. Then, we estimate risk of sabotage at deployment time by extrapolating from our monitor's false negative rate. We describe one simple model for this extrapolation, present a sensitivity analysis, and describe situations in which the model would be invalid. Code is available at: https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/async-control.

Recent advances in large vision-language models have led to impressive performance in visual question answering and multimodal reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely perform grounded visual reasoning or rely on superficial patterns and dataset biases. In this work, we introduce MagiC, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate grounded multimodal cognition, assessing not only answer accuracy but also the quality of step-by-step reasoning and its alignment with relevant visual evidence. Our benchmark includes approximately 5,500 weakly supervised QA examples generated from strong model outputs and 900 human-curated examples with fine-grained annotations, including answers, rationales, and bounding box groundings. We evaluate 15 vision-language models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters across four dimensions: final answer correctness, reasoning validity, grounding fidelity, and self-correction ability. MagiC further includes diagnostic settings to probe model robustness under adversarial visual cues and assess their capacity for introspective error correction. We introduce new metrics such as MagiScore and StepSense, and provide comprehensive analyses that reveal key limitations and opportunities in current approaches to grounded visual reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. Nonetheless, it was also witnessed that LLMs tend to produce inaccurate responses to specific queries. This deficiency can be traced to the tokenization step LLMs must undergo, which is an inevitable limitation inherent to all LLMs. In fact, incorrect tokenization is the critical point that hinders LLMs in understanding the input precisely, thus leading to unsatisfactory output. To demonstrate this flaw of LLMs, we construct an adversarial dataset, named as ADT (Adversarial Dataset for Tokenizer), which draws upon the vocabularies of various open-source LLMs to challenge LLMs' tokenization. ADT consists of two subsets: the manually constructed ADT-Human and the automatically generated ADT-Auto. Our empirical results reveal that our ADT is highly effective on challenging the tokenization of leading LLMs, including GPT-4o, Llama-3, Qwen2.5-max and so on, thus degrading these LLMs' capabilities. Moreover, our method of automatic data generation has been proven efficient and robust, which can be applied to any open-source LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to investigating LLMs' vulnerability in terms of challenging their token segmentation, which will shed light on the subsequent research of improving LLMs' capabilities through optimizing their tokenization process and algorithms.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been a pioneering force in the realm of deep generative models. Amongst its legions of progenies, Wasserstein Autoencoders (WAEs) stand out in particular due to the dual offering of heightened generative quality and a strong theoretical backbone. WAEs consist of an encoding and a decoding network forming a bottleneck with the prime objective of generating new samples resembling the ones it was catered to. In the process, they aim to achieve a target latent representation of the encoded data. Our work is an attempt to offer a theoretical understanding of the machinery behind WAEs. From a statistical viewpoint, we pose the problem as concurrent density estimation tasks based on neural network-induced transformations. This allows us to establish deterministic upper bounds on the realized errors WAEs commit. We also analyze the propagation of these stochastic errors in the presence of adversaries. As a result, both the large sample properties of the reconstructed distribution and the resilience of WAE models are explored.

Aiming to enhance Face Recognition (FR) on Low-Quality (LQ) inputs, recent studies suggest incorporating synthetic LQ samples into training. Although promising, the quality factors that are considered in these works are general rather than FR-specific, \eg, atmospheric turbulence, resolution, \etc. Motivated by the observation of the vulnerability of current FR models to even small Face Alignment Errors (FAE) in LQ images, we present a simple yet effective method that considers FAE as another quality factor that is tailored to FR. We seek to improve LQ FR by enhancing FR models' robustness to FAE. To this aim, we formalize the problem as a combination of differentiable spatial transformations and adversarial data augmentation in FR. We perturb the alignment of the training samples using a controllable spatial transformation and enrich the training with samples expressing FAE. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method by conducting evaluations on IJB-B, IJB-C, IJB-S (+4.3\% Rank1), and TinyFace (+2.63\%). https://github.com/msed-Ebrahimi/ARoFace{https://github.com/msed-Ebrahimi/ARoFace}

Despite rapid progress in the recent past, current speech recognition systems still require labeled training data which limits this technology to a small fraction of the languages spoken around the globe. This paper describes wav2vec-U, short for wav2vec Unsupervised, a method to train speech recognition models without any labeled data. We leverage self-supervised speech representations to segment unlabeled audio and learn a mapping from these representations to phonemes via adversarial training. The right representations are key to the success of our method. Compared to the best previous unsupervised work, wav2vec-U reduces the phoneme error rate on the TIMIT benchmark from 26.1 to 11.3. On the larger English Librispeech benchmark, wav2vec-U achieves a word error rate of 5.9 on test-other, rivaling some of the best published systems trained on 960 hours of labeled data from only two years ago. We also experiment on nine other languages, including low-resource languages such as Kyrgyz, Swahili and Tatar.

A multilayer perceptron can behave as a generative classifier by applying bidirectional learning (BL). It consists of training an undirected neural network to map input to output and vice-versa; therefore it can produce a classifier in one direction, and a generator in the opposite direction for the same data. The learning process of BL tries to reproduce the neuroplasticity stated in Hebbian theory using only backward propagation of errors. In this paper, two novel learning techniques are introduced which use BL for improving robustness to white noise static and adversarial examples. The first method is bidirectional propagation of errors, which the error propagation occurs in backward and forward directions. Motivated by the fact that its generative model receives as input a constant vector per class, we introduce as a second method the hybrid adversarial networks (HAN). Its generative model receives a random vector as input and its training is based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). To assess the performance of BL, we perform experiments using several architectures with fully and convolutional layers, with and without bias. Experimental results show that both methods improve robustness to white noise static and adversarial examples, and even increase accuracy, but have different behavior depending on the architecture and task, being more beneficial to use the one or the other. Nevertheless, HAN using a convolutional architecture with batch normalization presents outstanding robustness, reaching state-of-the-art accuracy on adversarial examples of hand-written digits.

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open problem: Its use has primarily been limited to relatively small-scale ML problems, such as sample-wise adversarial attack generation. To our best knowledge, no prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of ZO optimization in training deep neural networks (DNNs) without a significant decrease in performance. To overcome this roadblock, we develop DeepZero, a principled ZO deep learning (DL) framework that can scale ZO optimization to DNN training from scratch through three primary innovations. First, we demonstrate the advantages of coordinatewise gradient estimation (CGE) over randomized vector-wise gradient estimation in training accuracy and computational efficiency. Second, we propose a sparsityinduced ZO training protocol that extends the model pruning methodology using only finite differences to explore and exploit the sparse DL prior in CGE. Third, we develop the methods of feature reuse and forward parallelization to advance the practical implementations of ZO training. Our extensive experiments show that DeepZero achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on ResNet-20 trained on CIFAR-10, approaching FO training performance for the first time. Furthermore, we show the practical utility of DeepZero in applications of certified adversarial defense and DL-based partial differential equation error correction, achieving 10-20% improvement over SOTA. We believe our results will inspire future research on scalable ZO optimization and contribute to advancing DL with black box. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/DeepZero.

In this work we explore Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of pretrained language models for downstream tasks. We introduce UDALM, a fine-tuning procedure, using a mixed classification and Masked Language Model loss, that can adapt to the target domain distribution in a robust and sample efficient manner. Our experiments show that performance of models trained with the mixed loss scales with the amount of available target data and the mixed loss can be effectively used as a stopping criterion during UDA training. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between A-distance and the target error and explore some limitations of the Domain Adversarial Training approach. Our method is evaluated on twelve domain pairs of the Amazon Reviews Sentiment dataset, yielding 91.74% accuracy, which is an 1.11% absolute improvement over the state-of-the-art.

The open-world deployment of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles needs to address a variety of ML vulnerabilities such as interpretability, verifiability, and performance limitations. Research explores different approaches to improve ML dependability by proposing new models and training techniques to reduce generalization error, achieve domain adaptation, and detect outlier examples and adversarial attacks. However, there is a missing connection between ongoing ML research and well-established safety principles. In this paper, we present a structured and comprehensive review of ML techniques to improve the dependability of ML algorithms in uncontrolled open-world settings. From this review, we propose the Taxonomy of ML Safety that maps state-of-the-art ML techniques to key engineering safety strategies. Our taxonomy of ML safety presents a safety-oriented categorization of ML techniques to provide guidance for improving dependability of the ML design and development. The proposed taxonomy can serve as a safety checklist to aid designers in improving coverage and diversity of safety strategies employed in any given ML system.

Recent advances in reasoning models and agentic AI systems have led to an increased reliance on diverse external information. However, this shift introduces input contexts that are inherently noisy, a reality that current sanitized benchmarks fail to capture. We introduce NoisyBench, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates model robustness across 11 datasets in RAG, reasoning, alignment, and tool-use tasks against diverse noise types, including random documents, irrelevant chat histories, and hard negative distractors. Our evaluation reveals a catastrophic performance drop of up to 80% in state-of-the-art models when faced with contextual distractors. Crucially, we find that agentic workflows often amplify these errors by over-trusting noisy tool outputs, and distractors can trigger emergent misalignment even without adversarial intent. We find that prompting, context engineering, SFT, and outcome-reward only RL fail to ensure robustness; in contrast, our proposed Rationale-Aware Reward (RARE) significantly strengthens resilience by incentivizing the identification of helpful information within noise. Finally, we uncover an inverse scaling trend where increased test-time computation leads to worse performance in noisy settings and demonstrate via attention visualization that models disproportionately focus on distractor tokens, providing vital insights for building the next generation of robust, reasoning-capable agents.

Detecting text generated by large language models (LLMs) is of great recent interest. With zero-shot methods like DetectGPT, detection capabilities have reached impressive levels. However, the reliability of existing detectors in real-world applications remains underexplored. In this study, we present a new benchmark, DetectRL, highlighting that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection techniques still underperformed in this task. We collected human-written datasets from domains where LLMs are particularly prone to misuse. Using popular LLMs, we generated data that better aligns with real-world applications. Unlike previous studies, we employed heuristic rules to create adversarial LLM-generated text, simulating advanced prompt usages, human revisions like word substitutions, and writing errors. Our development of DetectRL reveals the strengths and limitations of current SOTA detectors. More importantly, we analyzed the potential impact of writing styles, model types, attack methods, the text lengths, and real-world human writing factors on different types of detectors. We believe DetectRL could serve as an effective benchmark for assessing detectors in real-world scenarios, evolving with advanced attack methods, thus providing more stressful evaluation to drive the development of more efficient detectors. Data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/DetectRL.

LLM self-explanations are often presented as a promising tool for AI oversight, yet their faithfulness to the model's true reasoning process is poorly understood. Existing faithfulness metrics have critical limitations, typically relying on identifying unfaithfulness via adversarial prompting or detecting reasoning errors. These methods overlook the predictive value of explanations. We introduce Normalized Simulatability Gain (NSG), a general and scalable metric based on the idea that a faithful explanation should allow an observer to learn a model's decision-making criteria, and thus better predict its behavior on related inputs. We evaluate 18 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, e.g., Gemini 3, GPT-5.2, and Claude 4.5, on 7,000 counterfactuals from popular datasets covering health, business, and ethics. We find self-explanations substantially improve prediction of model behavior (11-37% NSG). Self-explanations also provide more predictive information than explanations generated by external models, even when those models are stronger. This implies an advantage from self-knowledge that external explanation methods cannot replicate. Our approach also reveals that, across models, 5-15% of self-explanations are egregiously misleading. Despite their imperfections, we show a positive case for self-explanations: they encode information that helps predict model behavior.

In this paper, we establish a benchmark named HalluQA (Chinese Hallucination Question-Answering) to measure the hallucination phenomenon in Chinese large language models. HalluQA contains 450 meticulously designed adversarial questions, spanning multiple domains, and takes into account Chinese historical culture, customs, and social phenomena. During the construction of HalluQA, we consider two types of hallucinations: imitative falsehoods and factual errors, and we construct adversarial samples based on GLM-130B and ChatGPT. For evaluation, we design an automated evaluation method using GPT-4 to judge whether a model output is hallucinated. We conduct extensive experiments on 24 large language models, including ERNIE-Bot, Baichuan2, ChatGLM, Qwen, SparkDesk and etc. Out of the 24 models, 18 achieved non-hallucination rates lower than 50%. This indicates that HalluQA is highly challenging. We analyze the primary types of hallucinations in different types of models and their causes. Additionally, we discuss which types of hallucinations should be prioritized for different types of models.

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for software maintenance tasks such as automated program repair (APR). APR agents automatically fetch GitHub issues and use backend LLMs to generate patches that fix the reported bugs. However, existing work primarily focuses on the functional correctness of APR-generated patches, whether they pass hidden or regression tests, while largely ignoring potential security risks. Given the openness of platforms like GitHub, where any user can raise issues and participate in discussions, an important question arises: Can an adversarial user submit a valid issue on GitHub that misleads an LLM-based agent into generating a functionally correct but vulnerable patch? To answer this question, we propose SWExploit, which generates adversarial issue statements designed to make APR agents produce patches that are functionally correct yet vulnerable. SWExploit operates in three main steps: (1) program analysis to identify potential injection points for vulnerable payloads; (2) adversarial issue generation to provide misleading reproduction and error information while preserving the original issue semantics; and (3) iterative refinement of the adversarial issue statements based on the outputs of the APR agents. Empirical evaluation on three agent pipelines and five backend LLMs shows that SWExploit can produce patches that are both functionally correct and vulnerable (the attack success rate on the correct patch could reach 0.91, whereas the baseline ASRs are all below 0.20). Based on our evaluation, we are the first to challenge the traditional assumption that a patch passing all tests is inherently reliable and secure, highlighting critical limitations in the current evaluation paradigm for APR agents.

As large language models are integrated into society, robustness toward a suite of prompts is increasingly important to maintain reliability in a high-variance environment.Robustness evaluations must comprehensively encapsulate the various settings in which a user may invoke an intelligent system. This paper proposes ASSERT, Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming, consisting of three methods -- semantically aligned augmentation, target bootstrapping, and adversarial knowledge injection. For robust safety evaluation, we apply these methods in the critical domain of AI safety to algorithmically generate a test suite of prompts covering diverse robustness settings -- semantic equivalence, related scenarios, and adversarial. We partition our prompts into four safety domains for a fine-grained analysis of how the domain affects model performance. Despite dedicated safeguards in existing state-of-the-art models, we find statistically significant performance differences of up to 11% in absolute classification accuracy among semantically related scenarios and error rates of up to 19% absolute error in zero-shot adversarial settings, raising concerns for users' physical safety.

Abusive language is a growing concern in many social media platforms. Repeated exposure to abusive speech has created physiological effects on the target users. Thus, the problem of abusive language should be addressed in all forms for online peace and safety. While extensive research exists in abusive speech detection, most studies focus on English. Recently, many smearing incidents have occurred in India, which provoked diverse forms of abusive speech in online space in various languages based on the geographic location. Therefore it is essential to deal with such malicious content. In this paper, to bridge the gap, we demonstrate a large-scale analysis of multilingual abusive speech in Indic languages. We examine different interlingual transfer mechanisms and observe the performance of various multilingual models for abusive speech detection for eight different Indic languages. We also experiment to show how robust these models are on adversarial attacks. Finally, we conduct an in-depth error analysis by looking into the models' misclassified posts across various settings. We have made our code and models public for other researchers.

Robotic manipulation requires anticipating how the environment evolves in response to actions, yet most existing systems lack this predictive capability, often resulting in errors and inefficiency. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide high-level guidance, they cannot explicitly forecast future states, and existing world models either predict only short horizons or produce spatially inconsistent frames. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for fast and predictive video-conditioned action. Our approach first selects and adapts a robust video generation model to ensure reliable future predictions, then applies adversarial distillation for fast, few-step video generation, and finally trains an action model that leverages both generated videos and real observations to correct spatial errors. Extensive experiments show that our method produces temporally coherent, spatially accurate video predictions that directly support precise manipulation, achieving significant improvements in embodiment consistency, spatial referring ability, and task completion over existing baselines. Codes & Models will be released.

Constructing benchmarks that test the abilities of modern natural language understanding models is difficult - pre-trained language models exploit artifacts in benchmarks to achieve human parity, but still fail on adversarial examples and make errors that demonstrate a lack of common sense. In this work, we propose gamification as a framework for data construction. The goal of players in the game is to compose questions that mislead a rival AI while using specific phrases for extra points. The game environment leads to enhanced user engagement and simultaneously gives the game designer control over the collected data, allowing us to collect high-quality data at scale. Using our method we create CommonsenseQA 2.0, which includes 14,343 yes/no questions, and demonstrate its difficulty for models that are orders-of-magnitude larger than the AI used in the game itself. Our best baseline, the T5-based Unicorn with 11B parameters achieves an accuracy of 70.2%, substantially higher than GPT-3 (52.9%) in a few-shot inference setup. Both score well below human performance which is at 94.1%.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in professional settings faces challenges that existing benchmarks underplay: dense domain terminology, formal register variation, and near-zero tolerance for critical entity errors. We present ProfASR-Bench, a professional-talk evaluation suite for high-stakes applications across finance, medicine, legal, and technology. Each example pairs a natural-language prompt (domain cue and/or speaker profile) with an entity-rich target utterance, enabling controlled measurement of context-conditioned recognition. The corpus supports conventional ASR metrics alongside entity-aware scores and slice-wise reporting by accent and gender. Using representative families Whisper (encoder-decoder ASR) and Qwen-Omni (audio language models) under matched no-context, profile, domain+profile, oracle, and adversarial conditions, we find a consistent pattern: lightweight textual context produces little to no change in average word error rate (WER), even with oracle prompts, and adversarial prompts do not reliably degrade performance. We term this the context-utilization gap (CUG): current systems are nominally promptable yet underuse readily available side information. ProfASR-Bench provides a standardized context ladder, entity- and slice-aware reporting with confidence intervals, and a reproducible testbed for comparing fusion strategies across model families. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/prdeepakbabu/ProfASR-Bench Code: https://github.com/prdeepakbabu/ProfASR-Bench

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-risk domains. However, state-of-the-art LLMs often produce hallucinations, raising serious concerns about their reliability. Prior work has explored adversarial attacks for hallucination elicitation in LLMs, but it often produces unrealistic prompts, either by inserting gibberish tokens or by altering the original meaning. As a result, these approaches offer limited insight into how hallucinations may occur in practice. While adversarial attacks in computer vision often involve realistic modifications to input images, the problem of finding realistic adversarial prompts for eliciting LLM hallucinations has remained largely underexplored. To address this gap, we propose Semantically Equivalent and Coherent Attacks (SECA) to elicit hallucinations via realistic modifications to the prompt that preserve its meaning while maintaining semantic coherence. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we formulate finding realistic attacks for hallucination elicitation as a constrained optimization problem over the input prompt space under semantic equivalence and coherence constraints; (ii) we introduce a constraint-preserving zeroth-order method to effectively search for adversarial yet feasible prompts; and (iii) we demonstrate through experiments on open-ended multiple-choice question answering tasks that SECA achieves higher attack success rates while incurring almost no semantic equivalence or semantic coherence errors compared to existing methods. SECA highlights the sensitivity of both open-source and commercial gradient-inaccessible LLMs to realistic and plausible prompt variations. Code is available at https://github.com/Buyun-Liang/SECA.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the automation of data science workflows. Yet it remains unclear whether they can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. To answer this question, we introduce AssistedDS (Assisted Data Science), a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate how LLMs handle domain knowledge in tabular prediction tasks. AssistedDS features both synthetic datasets with explicitly known generative mechanisms and real-world Kaggle competitions, each accompanied by curated bundles of helpful and adversarial documents. These documents provide domain-specific insights into data cleaning, feature engineering, and model selection. We assess state-of-the-art LLMs on their ability to discern and apply beneficial versus harmful domain knowledge, evaluating submission validity, information recall, and predictive performance. Our results demonstrate three key findings: (1) LLMs frequently exhibit an uncritical adoption of provided information, significantly impairing their predictive performance when adversarial content is introduced, (2) helpful guidance is often insufficient to counteract the negative influence of adversarial information, and (3) in Kaggle datasets, LLMs often make errors in handling time-series data, applying consistent feature engineering across different folds, and interpreting categorical variables correctly. These findings highlight a substantial gap in current models' ability to critically evaluate and leverage expert knowledge, underscoring an essential research direction for developing more robust, knowledge-aware automated data science systems.

To obtain, deterministic guarantees of adversarial robustness, specialized training methods are used. We propose, SABR, a novel such certified training method, based on the key insight that propagating interval bounds for a small but carefully selected subset of the adversarial input region is sufficient to approximate the worst-case loss over the whole region while significantly reducing approximation errors. We show in an extensive empirical evaluation that SABR outperforms existing certified defenses in terms of both standard and certifiable accuracies across perturbation magnitudes and datasets, pointing to a new class of certified training methods promising to alleviate the robustness-accuracy trade-off.

Adversarial attacks are a major challenge faced by current machine learning research. These purposely crafted inputs fool even the most advanced models, precluding their deployment in safety-critical applications. Extensive research in computer vision has been carried to develop reliable defense strategies. However, the same issue remains less explored in natural language processing. Our work presents a model-agnostic detector of adversarial text examples. The approach identifies patterns in the logits of the target classifier when perturbing the input text. The proposed detector improves the current state-of-the-art performance in recognizing adversarial inputs and exhibits strong generalization capabilities across different NLP models, datasets, and word-level attacks.

Despite the success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in many academic benchmarks for computer vision tasks, their application in the real-world is still facing fundamental challenges. One of these open problems is the inherent lack of robustness, unveiled by the striking effectiveness of adversarial attacks. Current attack methods are able to manipulate the network's prediction by adding specific but small amounts of noise to the input. In turn, adversarial training (AT) aims to achieve robustness against such attacks and ideally a better model generalization ability by including adversarial samples in the trainingset. However, an in-depth analysis of the resulting robust models beyond adversarial robustness is still pending. In this paper, we empirically analyze a variety of adversarially trained models that achieve high robust accuracies when facing state-of-the-art attacks and we show that AT has an interesting side-effect: it leads to models that are significantly less overconfident with their decisions, even on clean data than non-robust models. Further, our analysis of robust models shows that not only AT but also the model's building blocks (like activation functions and pooling) have a strong influence on the models' prediction confidences. Data & Project website: https://github.com/GeJulia/robustness_confidences_evaluation

Over the last decade, deep neural networks have achieved state of the art in computer vision tasks. These models, however, are susceptible to unusual inputs, known as adversarial examples, that cause them to misclassify or otherwise fail to detect objects. Here, we provide evidence that the increasing success of adversarial attacks is primarily due to increasing their size. We then demonstrate a method for generating the largest possible adversarial patch by building a adversarial pattern out of repeatable elements. This approach achieves a new state of the art in evading detection by YOLOv2 and YOLOv3. Finally, we present an experiment that fails to replicate the prior success of several attacks published in this field, and end with some comments on testing and reproducibility.

Adversarial training, which is to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks, has received much attention because it is easy to generate human-imperceptible perturbations of data to deceive a given deep neural network. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial training algorithm that is theoretically well motivated and empirically superior to other existing algorithms. A novel feature of the proposed algorithm is to apply more regularization to data vulnerable to adversarial attacks than other existing regularization algorithms do. Theoretically, we show that our algorithm can be understood as an algorithm of minimizing the regularized empirical risk motivated from a newly derived upper bound of the robust risk. Numerical experiments illustrate that our proposed algorithm improves the generalization (accuracy on examples) and robustness (accuracy on adversarial attacks) simultaneously to achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved unprecedented success in numerous machine learning tasks in various domains. However, the existence of adversarial examples has raised concerns about applying deep learning to safety-critical applications. As a result, we have witnessed increasing interests in studying attack and defense mechanisms for DNN models on different data types, such as images, graphs and text. Thus, it is necessary to provide a systematic and comprehensive overview of the main threats of attacks and the success of corresponding countermeasures. In this survey, we review the state of the art algorithms for generating adversarial examples and the countermeasures against adversarial examples, for the three popular data types, i.e., images, graphs and text.

In the future, powerful AI systems may be deployed in high-stakes settings, where a single failure could be catastrophic. One technique for improving AI safety in high-stakes settings is adversarial training, which uses an adversary to generate examples to train on in order to achieve better worst-case performance. In this work, we used a safe language generation task (``avoid injuries'') as a testbed for achieving high reliability through adversarial training. We created a series of adversarial training techniques -- including a tool that assists human adversaries -- to find and eliminate failures in a classifier that filters text completions suggested by a generator. In our task, we determined that we can set very conservative classifier thresholds without significantly impacting the quality of the filtered outputs. We found that adversarial training increased robustness to the adversarial attacks that we trained on -- doubling the time for our contractors to find adversarial examples both with our tool (from 13 to 26 minutes) and without (from 20 to 44 minutes) -- without affecting in-distribution performance. We hope to see further work in the high-stakes reliability setting, including more powerful tools for enhancing human adversaries and better ways to measure high levels of reliability, until we can confidently rule out the possibility of catastrophic deployment-time failures of powerful models.

Adversarial examples cause neural networks to produce incorrect outputs with high confidence. Although adversarial training is one of the most effective forms of defense against adversarial examples, unfortunately, a large gap exists between test accuracy and training accuracy in adversarial training. In this paper, we identify Adversarial Feature Overfitting (AFO), which may cause poor adversarially robust generalization, and we show that adversarial training can overshoot the optimal point in terms of robust generalization, leading to AFO in our simple Gaussian model. Considering these theoretical results, we present soft labeling as a solution to the AFO problem. Furthermore, we propose Adversarial Vertex mixup (AVmixup), a soft-labeled data augmentation approach for improving adversarially robust generalization. We complement our theoretical analysis with experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet, and show that AVmixup significantly improves the robust generalization performance and that it reduces the trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness.

Machine learning systems based on deep neural networks, being able to produce state-of-the-art results on various perception tasks, have gained mainstream adoption in many applications. However, they are shown to be vulnerable to adversarial example attack, which generates malicious output by adding slight perturbations to the input. Previous adversarial example crafting methods, however, use simple metrics to evaluate the distances between the original examples and the adversarial ones, which could be easily detected by human eyes. In addition, these attacks are often not robust due to the inevitable noises and deviation in the physical world. In this work, we present a new adversarial example attack crafting method, which takes the human perceptual system into consideration and maximizes the noise tolerance of the crafted adversarial example. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique.

Recent research finds CNN models for image classification demonstrate overlapped adversarial vulnerabilities: adversarial attacks can mislead CNN models with small perturbations, which can effectively transfer between different models trained on the same dataset. Adversarial training, as a general robustness improvement technique, eliminates the vulnerability in a single model by forcing it to learn robust features. The process is hard, often requires models with large capacity, and suffers from significant loss on clean data accuracy. Alternatively, ensemble methods are proposed to induce sub-models with diverse outputs against a transfer adversarial example, making the ensemble robust against transfer attacks even if each sub-model is individually non-robust. Only small clean accuracy drop is observed in the process. However, previous ensemble training methods are not efficacious in inducing such diversity and thus ineffective on reaching robust ensemble. We propose DVERGE, which isolates the adversarial vulnerability in each sub-model by distilling non-robust features, and diversifies the adversarial vulnerability to induce diverse outputs against a transfer attack. The novel diversity metric and training procedure enables DVERGE to achieve higher robustness against transfer attacks comparing to previous ensemble methods, and enables the improved robustness when more sub-models are added to the ensemble. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/zjysteven/DVERGE

Machine learning (ML) models, e.g., deep neural networks (DNNs), are vulnerable to adversarial examples: malicious inputs modified to yield erroneous model outputs, while appearing unmodified to human observers. Potential attacks include having malicious content like malware identified as legitimate or controlling vehicle behavior. Yet, all existing adversarial example attacks require knowledge of either the model internals or its training data. We introduce the first practical demonstration of an attacker controlling a remotely hosted DNN with no such knowledge. Indeed, the only capability of our black-box adversary is to observe labels given by the DNN to chosen inputs. Our attack strategy consists in training a local model to substitute for the target DNN, using inputs synthetically generated by an adversary and labeled by the target DNN. We use the local substitute to craft adversarial examples, and find that they are misclassified by the targeted DNN. To perform a real-world and properly-blinded evaluation, we attack a DNN hosted by MetaMind, an online deep learning API. We find that their DNN misclassifies 84.24% of the adversarial examples crafted with our substitute. We demonstrate the general applicability of our strategy to many ML techniques by conducting the same attack against models hosted by Amazon and Google, using logistic regression substitutes. They yield adversarial examples misclassified by Amazon and Google at rates of 96.19% and 88.94%. We also find that this black-box attack strategy is capable of evading defense strategies previously found to make adversarial example crafting harder.

Large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved tremendous success across a wide range of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, even surpassing human performance. However, recent studies reveal that the robustness of these models can be challenged by carefully crafted textual adversarial examples. While several individual datasets have been proposed to evaluate model robustness, a principled and comprehensive benchmark is still missing. In this paper, we present Adversarial GLUE (AdvGLUE), a new multi-task benchmark to quantitatively and thoroughly explore and evaluate the vulnerabilities of modern large-scale language models under various types of adversarial attacks. In particular, we systematically apply 14 textual adversarial attack methods to GLUE tasks to construct AdvGLUE, which is further validated by humans for reliable annotations. Our findings are summarized as follows. (i) Most existing adversarial attack algorithms are prone to generating invalid or ambiguous adversarial examples, with around 90% of them either changing the original semantic meanings or misleading human annotators as well. Therefore, we perform a careful filtering process to curate a high-quality benchmark. (ii) All the language models and robust training methods we tested perform poorly on AdvGLUE, with scores lagging far behind the benign accuracy. We hope our work will motivate the development of new adversarial attacks that are more stealthy and semantic-preserving, as well as new robust language models against sophisticated adversarial attacks. AdvGLUE is available at https://adversarialglue.github.io.

We introduce the MNIST-C dataset, a comprehensive suite of 15 corruptions applied to the MNIST test set, for benchmarking out-of-distribution robustness in computer vision. Through several experiments and visualizations we demonstrate that our corruptions significantly degrade performance of state-of-the-art computer vision models while preserving the semantic content of the test images. In contrast to the popular notion of adversarial robustness, our model-agnostic corruptions do not seek worst-case performance but are instead designed to be broad and diverse, capturing multiple failure modes of modern models. In fact, we find that several previously published adversarial defenses significantly degrade robustness as measured by MNIST-C. We hope that our benchmark serves as a useful tool for future work in designing systems that are able to learn robust feature representations that capture the underlying semantics of the input.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. A range of defense methods have been proposed to train adversarially robust DNNs, among which adversarial training has demonstrated promising results. However, despite preliminary understandings developed for adversarial training, it is still not clear, from the architectural perspective, what configurations can lead to more robust DNNs. In this paper, we address this gap via a comprehensive investigation on the impact of network width and depth on the robustness of adversarially trained DNNs. Specifically, we make the following key observations: 1) more parameters (higher model capacity) does not necessarily help adversarial robustness; 2) reducing capacity at the last stage (the last group of blocks) of the network can actually improve adversarial robustness; and 3) under the same parameter budget, there exists an optimal architectural configuration for adversarial robustness. We also provide a theoretical analysis explaning why such network configuration can help robustness. These architectural insights can help design adversarially robust DNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/HanxunH/RobustWRN.

Adversarial examples are commonly viewed as a threat to ConvNets. Here we present an opposite perspective: adversarial examples can be used to improve image recognition models if harnessed in the right manner. We propose AdvProp, an enhanced adversarial training scheme which treats adversarial examples as additional examples, to prevent overfitting. Key to our method is the usage of a separate auxiliary batch norm for adversarial examples, as they have different underlying distributions to normal examples. We show that AdvProp improves a wide range of models on various image recognition tasks and performs better when the models are bigger. For instance, by applying AdvProp to the latest EfficientNet-B7 [28] on ImageNet, we achieve significant improvements on ImageNet (+0.7%), ImageNet-C (+6.5%), ImageNet-A (+7.0%), Stylized-ImageNet (+4.8%). With an enhanced EfficientNet-B8, our method achieves the state-of-the-art 85.5% ImageNet top-1 accuracy without extra data. This result even surpasses the best model in [20] which is trained with 3.5B Instagram images (~3000X more than ImageNet) and ~9.4X more parameters. Models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.

Adversarial examples, generated by carefully crafted perturbation, have attracted considerable attention in research fields. Recent works have argued that the existence of the robust and non-robust features is a primary cause of the adversarial examples, and investigated their internal interactions in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a way of explicitly distilling feature representation into the robust and non-robust features, using Information Bottleneck. Specifically, we inject noise variation to each feature unit and evaluate the information flow in the feature representation to dichotomize feature units either robust or non-robust, based on the noise variation magnitude. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the distilled features are highly correlated with adversarial prediction, and they have human-perceptible semantic information by themselves. Furthermore, we present an attack mechanism intensifying the gradient of non-robust features that is directly related to the model prediction, and validate its effectiveness of breaking model robustness.

Recent work have demonstrated that robustness (to "corruption") can be at odds with generalization. Adversarial training, for instance, aims to reduce the problematic susceptibility of modern neural networks to small data perturbations. Surprisingly, overfitting is a major concern in adversarial training despite being mostly absent in standard training. We provide here theoretical evidence for this peculiar "robust overfitting" phenomenon. Subsequently, we advance a novel distributionally robust loss function bridging robustness and generalization. We demonstrate both theoretically as well as empirically the loss to enjoy a certified level of robustness against two common types of corruption--data evasion and poisoning attacks--while ensuring guaranteed generalization. We show through careful numerical experiments that our resulting holistic robust (HR) training procedure yields SOTA performance. Finally, we indicate that HR training can be interpreted as a direct extension of adversarial training and comes with a negligible additional computational burden. A ready-to-use python library implementing our algorithm is available at https://github.com/RyanLucas3/HR_Neural_Networks.

Adversarial robustness is a research area that has recently received a lot of attention in the quest for trustworthy artificial intelligence. However, recent works on adversarial robustness have focused on supervised learning where it is assumed that labeled data is plentiful. In this paper, we investigate semi-supervised adversarial training where labeled data is scarce. We derive two upper bounds for the robust risk and propose a regularization term for unlabeled data motivated by these two upper bounds. Then, we develop a semi-supervised adversarial training algorithm that combines the proposed regularization term with knowledge distillation using a semi-supervised teacher (i.e., a teacher model trained using a semi-supervised learning algorithm). Our experiments show that our proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant margins compared to existing algorithms. In particular, compared to supervised learning algorithms, performance of our proposed algorithm is not much worse even when the amount of labeled data is very small. For example, our algorithm with only 8\% labeled data is comparable to supervised adversarial training algorithms that use all labeled data, both in terms of standard and robust accuracies on CIFAR-10.

Reliable deployment of machine learning models such as neural networks continues to be challenging due to several limitations. Some of the main shortcomings are the lack of interpretability and the lack of robustness against adversarial examples or out-of-distribution inputs. In this exploratory review, we explore the possibilities and limits of adversarial attacks for explainable machine learning models. First, we extend the notion of adversarial examples to fit in explainable machine learning scenarios, in which the inputs, the output classifications and the explanations of the model's decisions are assessed by humans. Next, we propose a comprehensive framework to study whether (and how) adversarial examples can be generated for explainable models under human assessment, introducing and illustrating novel attack paradigms. In particular, our framework considers a wide range of relevant yet often ignored factors such as the type of problem, the user expertise or the objective of the explanations, in order to identify the attack strategies that should be adopted in each scenario to successfully deceive the model (and the human). The intention of these contributions is to serve as a basis for a more rigorous and realistic study of adversarial examples in the field of explainable machine learning.

Neural networks provide state-of-the-art results for most machine learning tasks. Unfortunately, neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples: given an input x and any target classification t, it is possible to find a new input x' that is similar to x but classified as t. This makes it difficult to apply neural networks in security-critical areas. Defensive distillation is a recently proposed approach that can take an arbitrary neural network, and increase its robustness, reducing the success rate of current attacks' ability to find adversarial examples from 95% to 0.5%. In this paper, we demonstrate that defensive distillation does not significantly increase the robustness of neural networks by introducing three new attack algorithms that are successful on both distilled and undistilled neural networks with 100% probability. Our attacks are tailored to three distance metrics used previously in the literature, and when compared to previous adversarial example generation algorithms, our attacks are often much more effective (and never worse). Furthermore, we propose using high-confidence adversarial examples in a simple transferability test we show can also be used to break defensive distillation. We hope our attacks will be used as a benchmark in future defense attempts to create neural networks that resist adversarial examples.

Existing neural networks for computer vision tasks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: adding imperceptible perturbations to the input images can fool these methods to make a false prediction on an image that was correctly predicted without the perturbation. Various defense methods have proposed image-to-image mapping methods, either including these perturbations in the training process or removing them in a preprocessing denoising step. In doing so, existing methods often ignore that the natural RGB images in today's datasets are not captured but, in fact, recovered from RAW color filter array captures that are subject to various degradations in the capture. In this work, we exploit this RAW data distribution as an empirical prior for adversarial defense. Specifically, we proposed a model-agnostic adversarial defensive method, which maps the input RGB images to Bayer RAW space and back to output RGB using a learned camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to eliminate potential adversarial patterns. The proposed method acts as an off-the-shelf preprocessing module and, unlike model-specific adversarial training methods, does not require adversarial images to train. As a result, the method generalizes to unseen tasks without additional retraining. Experiments on large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet, COCO) for different vision tasks (e.g., classification, semantic segmentation, object detection) validate that the method significantly outperforms existing methods across task domains.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems are used in various applications. However, it has been shown that they are vulnerable to very small perturbations of their inputs, known as adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a new targeted adversarial attack against NMT models. In particular, our goal is to insert a predefined target keyword into the translation of the adversarial sentence while maintaining similarity between the original sentence and the perturbed one in the source domain. To this aim, we propose an optimization problem, including an adversarial loss term and a similarity term. We use gradient projection in the embedding space to craft an adversarial sentence. Experimental results show that our attack outperforms Seq2Sick, the other targeted adversarial attack against NMT models, in terms of success rate and decrease in translation quality. Our attack succeeds in inserting a keyword into the translation for more than 75% of sentences while similarity with the original sentence stays preserved.

Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of pre-trained language models to adversarial attacks. Existing adversarial defense techniques attempt to reconstruct adversarial examples within feature or text spaces. However, these methods struggle to effectively repair the semantics in adversarial examples, resulting in unsatisfactory performance and limiting their practical utility. To repair the semantics in adversarial examples, we introduce a novel approach named Reactive Perturbation Defocusing (Rapid). Rapid employs an adversarial detector to identify fake labels of adversarial examples and leverage adversarial attackers to repair the semantics in adversarial examples. Our extensive experimental results conducted on four public datasets, convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of Rapid in various adversarial attack scenarios. To address the problem of defense performance validation in previous works, we provide a demonstration of adversarial detection and repair based on our work, which can be easily evaluated at https://tinyurl.com/22ercuf8.

We introduce two challenging datasets that reliably cause machine learning model performance to substantially degrade. The datasets are collected with a simple adversarial filtration technique to create datasets with limited spurious cues. Our datasets' real-world, unmodified examples transfer to various unseen models reliably, demonstrating that computer vision models have shared weaknesses. The first dataset is called ImageNet-A and is like the ImageNet test set, but it is far more challenging for existing models. We also curate an adversarial out-of-distribution detection dataset called ImageNet-O, which is the first out-of-distribution detection dataset created for ImageNet models. On ImageNet-A a DenseNet-121 obtains around 2% accuracy, an accuracy drop of approximately 90%, and its out-of-distribution detection performance on ImageNet-O is near random chance levels. We find that existing data augmentation techniques hardly boost performance, and using other public training datasets provides improvements that are limited. However, we find that improvements to computer vision architectures provide a promising path towards robust models.

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which can compromise their performance and accuracy. Adversarial Training (AT) has emerged as a popular approach for protecting neural networks against such attacks. However, a key challenge of AT is robust overfitting, where the network's robust performance on test data deteriorates with further training, thus hindering generalization. Motivated by the concept of active forgetting in the brain, we introduce a novel learning paradigm called "Forget to Mitigate Overfitting (FOMO)". FOMO alternates between the forgetting phase, which randomly forgets a subset of weights and regulates the model's information through weight reinitialization, and the relearning phase, which emphasizes learning generalizable features. Our experiments on benchmark datasets and adversarial attacks show that FOMO alleviates robust overfitting by significantly reducing the gap between the best and last robust test accuracy while improving the state-of-the-art robustness. Furthermore, FOMO provides a better trade-off between standard and robust accuracy, outperforming baseline adversarial methods. Finally, our framework is robust to AutoAttacks and increases generalization in many real-world scenarios.

This chapter introduces the concept of adversarial attacks on image classification models built on convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are very popular deep-learning models which are used in image classification tasks. However, very powerful and pre-trained CNN models working very accurately on image datasets for image classification tasks may perform disastrously when the networks are under adversarial attacks. In this work, two very well-known adversarial attacks are discussed and their impact on the performance of image classifiers is analyzed. These two adversarial attacks are the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and adversarial patch attack. These attacks are launched on three powerful pre-trained image classifier architectures, ResNet-34, GoogleNet, and DenseNet-161. The classification accuracy of the models in the absence and presence of the two attacks are computed on images from the publicly accessible ImageNet dataset. The results are analyzed to evaluate the impact of the attacks on the image classification task.

Deep neural networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial examples -- small, imperceptible changes constructed to cause mis-classification in otherwise highly accurate image classifiers. As a practical alternative, recent work proposed so-called adversarial patches: clearly visible, but adversarially crafted rectangular patches in images. These patches can easily be printed and applied in the physical world. While defenses against imperceptible adversarial examples have been studied extensively, robustness against adversarial patches is poorly understood. In this work, we first devise a practical approach to obtain adversarial patches while actively optimizing their location within the image. Then, we apply adversarial training on these location-optimized adversarial patches and demonstrate significantly improved robustness on CIFAR10 and GTSRB. Additionally, in contrast to adversarial training on imperceptible adversarial examples, our adversarial patch training does not reduce accuracy.

The phenomenon of adversarial examples illustrates one of the most basic vulnerabilities of deep neural networks. Among the variety of techniques introduced to surmount this inherent weakness, adversarial training has emerged as the most effective strategy for learning robust models. Typically, this is achieved by balancing robust and natural objectives. In this work, we aim to further optimize the trade-off between robust and standard accuracy by enforcing a domain-invariant feature representation. We present a new adversarial training method, Domain Invariant Adversarial Learning (DIAL), which learns a feature representation that is both robust and domain invariant. DIAL uses a variant of Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) on the natural domain and its corresponding adversarial domain. In the case where the source domain consists of natural examples and the target domain is the adversarially perturbed examples, our method learns a feature representation constrained not to discriminate between the natural and adversarial examples, and can therefore achieve a more robust representation. DIAL is a generic and modular technique that can be easily incorporated into any adversarial training method. Our experiments indicate that incorporating DIAL in the adversarial training process improves both robustness and standard accuracy.

Adversarial training for LLMs is one of the most promising methods to reliably improve robustness against adversaries. However, despite significant progress, models remain vulnerable to simple in-distribution exploits, such as rewriting prompts in the past tense or translating them into other languages. We argue that this persistent fragility stems from a fundamental limitation in current adversarial training algorithms: they minimize adversarial loss on their training set but inadequately cover the data distribution, resulting in vulnerability to seemingly simple attacks. To bridge this gap, we propose Distributional Adversarial Training, DAT. We leverage Diffusion LLMs to approximate the true joint distribution of prompts and responses, enabling generation of diverse, high-likelihood samples that address generalization failures. By combining optimization over the data distribution provided by the diffusion model with continuous adversarial training, DAT achieves substantially higher adversarial robustness than previous methods.

Adversarial examples provoke weak reliability and potential security issues in deep neural networks. Although adversarial training has been widely studied to improve adversarial robustness, it works in an over-parameterized regime and requires high computations and large memory budgets. To bridge adversarial robustness and model compression, we propose a novel adversarial pruning method, Masking Adversarial Damage (MAD) that employs second-order information of adversarial loss. By using it, we can accurately estimate adversarial saliency for model parameters and determine which parameters can be pruned without weakening adversarial robustness. Furthermore, we reveal that model parameters of initial layer are highly sensitive to the adversarial examples and show that compressed feature representation retains semantic information for the target objects. Through extensive experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that MAD effectively prunes adversarially trained networks without loosing adversarial robustness and shows better performance than previous adversarial pruning methods.

The study of adversarial vulnerabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs) has progressed rapidly. Existing attacks require either internal access (to the architecture, parameters, or training set of the victim model) or external access (to query the model). However, both the access may be infeasible or expensive in many scenarios. We investigate no-box adversarial examples, where the attacker can neither access the model information or the training set nor query the model. Instead, the attacker can only gather a small number of examples from the same problem domain as that of the victim model. Such a stronger threat model greatly expands the applicability of adversarial attacks. We propose three mechanisms for training with a very small dataset (on the order of tens of examples) and find that prototypical reconstruction is the most effective. Our experiments show that adversarial examples crafted on prototypical auto-encoding models transfer well to a variety of image classification and face verification models. On a commercial celebrity recognition system held by clarifai.com, our approach significantly diminishes the average prediction accuracy of the system to only 15.40%, which is on par with the attack that transfers adversarial examples from a pre-trained Arcface model.

The field of defense strategies against adversarial attacks has significantly grown over the last years, but progress is hampered as the evaluation of adversarial defenses is often insufficient and thus gives a wrong impression of robustness. Many promising defenses could be broken later on, making it difficult to identify the state-of-the-art. Frequent pitfalls in the evaluation are improper tuning of hyperparameters of the attacks, gradient obfuscation or masking. In this paper we first propose two extensions of the PGD-attack overcoming failures due to suboptimal step size and problems of the objective function. We then combine our novel attacks with two complementary existing ones to form a parameter-free, computationally affordable and user-independent ensemble of attacks to test adversarial robustness. We apply our ensemble to over 50 models from papers published at recent top machine learning and computer vision venues. In all except one of the cases we achieve lower robust test accuracy than reported in these papers, often by more than 10%, identifying several broken defenses.

Machine learning models are known to be susceptible to adversarial perturbation. One famous attack is the adversarial patch, a sticker with a particularly crafted pattern that makes the model incorrectly predict the object it is placed on. This attack presents a critical threat to cyber-physical systems that rely on cameras such as autonomous cars. Despite the significance of the problem, conducting research in this setting has been difficult; evaluating attacks and defenses in the real world is exceptionally costly while synthetic data are unrealistic. In this work, we propose the REAP (REalistic Adversarial Patch) benchmark, a digital benchmark that allows the user to evaluate patch attacks on real images, and under real-world conditions. Built on top of the Mapillary Vistas dataset, our benchmark contains over 14,000 traffic signs. Each sign is augmented with a pair of geometric and lighting transformations, which can be used to apply a digitally generated patch realistically onto the sign. Using our benchmark, we perform the first large-scale assessments of adversarial patch attacks under realistic conditions. Our experiments suggest that adversarial patch attacks may present a smaller threat than previously believed and that the success rate of an attack on simpler digital simulations is not predictive of its actual effectiveness in practice. We release our benchmark publicly at https://github.com/wagner-group/reap-benchmark.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in introducing vision into Large Language Models (LLMs). The proliferation of large Visual Language Models (VLMs), such as Flamingo, BLIP-2, and GPT-4, signifies an exciting convergence of advancements in both visual and language foundation models. Yet, the risks associated with this integrative approach are largely unexamined. In this paper, we shed light on the security and safety implications of this trend. First, we underscore that the continuous and high-dimensional nature of the additional visual input space intrinsically makes it a fertile ground for adversarial attacks. This unavoidably expands the attack surfaces of LLMs. Second, we highlight that the broad functionality of LLMs also presents visual attackers with a wider array of achievable adversarial objectives, extending the implications of security failures beyond mere misclassification. To elucidate these risks, we study adversarial examples in the visual input space of a VLM. Specifically, against MiniGPT-4, which incorporates safety mechanisms that can refuse harmful instructions, we present visual adversarial examples that can circumvent the safety mechanisms and provoke harmful behaviors of the model. Remarkably, we discover that adversarial examples, even if optimized on a narrow, manually curated derogatory corpus against specific social groups, can universally jailbreak the model's safety mechanisms. A single such adversarial example can generally undermine MiniGPT-4's safety, enabling it to heed a wide range of harmful instructions and produce harmful content far beyond simply imitating the derogatory corpus used in optimization. Unveiling these risks, we accentuate the urgent need for comprehensive risk assessments, robust defense strategies, and the implementation of responsible practices for the secure and safe utilization of VLMs.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks such as image classification, segmentation, and object detection. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can cause incorrect predictions with small perturbations in input images. Addressing this issue is crucial for deploying robust deep-learning systems. This paper presents a novel approach that utilizes contrastive learning for adversarial defense, a previously unexplored area. Our method leverages the contrastive loss function to enhance the robustness of classification models by training them with both clean and adversarially perturbed images. By optimizing the model's parameters alongside the perturbations, our approach enables the network to learn robust representations that are less susceptible to adversarial attacks. Experimental results show significant improvements in the model's robustness against various types of adversarial perturbations. This suggests that contrastive loss helps extract more informative and resilient features, contributing to the field of adversarial robustness in deep learning.

The study of adversarial robustness has so far largely focused on perturbations bound in p-norms. However, state-of-the-art models turn out to be also vulnerable to other, more natural classes of perturbations such as translations and rotations. In this work, we thoroughly investigate the vulnerability of neural network--based classifiers to rotations and translations. While data augmentation offers relatively small robustness, we use ideas from robust optimization and test-time input aggregation to significantly improve robustness. Finally we find that, in contrast to the p-norm case, first-order methods cannot reliably find worst-case perturbations. This highlights spatial robustness as a fundamentally different setting requiring additional study. Code available at https://github.com/MadryLab/adversarial_spatial and https://github.com/MadryLab/spatial-pytorch.