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  4. NAT: Learning to Attack Neurons for Enhanced Adversarial Transferability
 
conference paper

NAT: Learning to Attack Neurons for Enhanced Adversarial Transferability

Nakka, Krishna Kanth  
•
Alahi, Alexandre  
February 26, 2025
2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

The generation of transferable adversarial perturbations typically involves training a generator to maximize embedding separation between clean and adversarial images at a single mid-layer of a source model. In this work, we build on this approach and introduce Neuron Attack for Transferability (NAT), a method designed to target specific neuron within the embedding. Our approach is motivated by the observation that previous layer-level optimizations often disproportionately focus on a few neurons representing similar concepts, leaving other neurons within the attacked layer minimally affected. NAT shifts the focus from embeddinglevel separation to a more fundamental, neuron-specific approach. We find that targeting individual neurons effectively disrupts the core units of the neural network, providing a common basis for transferability across different models. Through extensive experiments on 41 diverse ImageNet models and 9 fine-grained models, NAT achieves fooling rates that surpass existing baselines by over 14% in cross-model and 4% in cross-domain settings. Furthermore, by leveraging the complementary attacking capabilities of the trained generators, we achieve impressive fooling rates within just 10 queries. Our code is available at: https://krishnakanthnakka.github.io/NAT/

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/wacv61041.2025.00738
Author(s)
Nakka, Krishna Kanth  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Alahi, Alexandre  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025-02-26

Publisher

IEEE

Published in
2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
DOI of the book
https://doi.org/10.1109/WACV61041.2025
ISBN of the book

979-8-3315-1083-1

Start page

7593

End page

7604

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
VITA  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

WACV 2025

Tucson, AZ, USA

2025-02-26 - 2025-03-06

Available on Infoscience
April 15, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/249274
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