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Zhengyu Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Zhengyu Zhao.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

SlowPerception: Physical-World Latency Attack against Visual Perception in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems critically depend on visual perception for real-time object detection and multiple object tracking (MOT) to ensure safe driving. However, high latency in these visual perception components can lead to significant safety risks, such as vehicle collisions. While previous research has extensively explored latency attacks within the digital realm, translating these methods effectively to the physical world presents challenges. For instance, existing attacks rely on perturbations that are unrealistic or impractical for AD, such as adversarial perturbations affecting areas like the sky, or requiring large patches that obscure most of a camera's view, thus making them impossible to be conducted effectively in the real world. In this paper, we introduce SlowPerception, the first physical-world latency attack against AD perception, via generating projector-based universal perturbations. SlowPerception strategically creates numerous phantom objects on various surfaces in the environment, significantly increasing the computational load of Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and MOT, thereby inducing substantial latency. Our SlowPerception achieves second-level latency in physical-world settings, with an average latency of 2.5 seconds across different AD perception systems, scenarios, and hardware configurations. This performance significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art latency attacks. Additionally, we conduct AD system-level impact assessments, such as vehicle collisions, using industry-grade AD systems with production-grade AD simulators with a 97% average rate. We hope that our analyses can inspire further research in this critical domain, enhancing the robustness of AD systems against emerging vulnerabilities.

cs.CV↗

ControlLoc: Physical-World Hijacking Attack on Visual Perception in Autonomous Driving

Recent research in adversarial machine learning has focused on visual perception in Autonomous Driving (AD) and has shown that printed adversarial patches can attack object detectors. However, it is important to note that AD visual perception encompasses more than just object detection; it also includes Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). MOT enhances the robustness by compensating for object detection errors and requiring consistent object detection results across multiple frames before influencing tracking results and driving decisions. Thus, MOT makes attacks on object detection alone less effective. To attack such robust AD visual perception, a digital hijacking attack has been proposed to cause dangerous driving scenarios. However, this attack has limited effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce a novel physical-world adversarial patch attack, ControlLoc, designed to exploit hijacking vulnerabilities in entire AD visual perception. ControlLoc utilizes a two-stage process: initially identifying the optimal location for the adversarial patch, and subsequently generating the patch that can modify the perceived location and shape of objects with the optimal location. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of ControlLoc, achieving an impressive average attack success rate of around 98.1% across various AD visual perceptions and datasets, which is four times greater effectiveness than the existing hijacking attack. The effectiveness of ControlLoc is further validated in physical-world conditions, including real vehicle tests under different conditions such as outdoor light conditions with an average attack success rate of 77.5%. AD system-level impact assessments are also included, such as vehicle collision, using industry-grade AD systems and production-grade AD simulators with an average vehicle collision rate and unnecessary emergency stop rate of 81.3%.

cs.CV↗

Collapse-Aware Triplet Decoupling for Adversarially Robust Image Retrieval

Adversarial training has achieved substantial performance in defending image retrieval against adversarial examples. However, existing studies in deep metric learning (DML) still suffer from two major limitations: weak adversary and model collapse. In this paper, we address these two limitations by proposing Collapse-Aware TRIplet DEcoupling (CA-TRIDE). Specifically, TRIDE yields a stronger adversary by spatially decoupling the perturbation targets into the anchor and the other candidates. Furthermore, CA prevents the consequential model collapse, based on a novel metric, collapseness, which is incorporated into the optimization of perturbation. We also identify two drawbacks of the existing robustness metric in image retrieval and propose a new metric for a more reasonable robustness evaluation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that CA-TRIDE outperforms existing defense methods in both conventional and new metrics. Codes are available at https://github.com/michaeltian108/CA-TRIDE.

cs.CV↗

Composite Backdoor Attacks Against Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to previous methods on various tasks, and often serve as the foundation models for many researches and services. However, the untrustworthy third-party LLMs may covertly introduce vulnerabilities for downstream tasks. In this paper, we explore the vulnerability of LLMs through the lens of backdoor attacks. Different from existing backdoor attacks against LLMs, ours scatters multiple trigger keys in different prompt components. Such a Composite Backdoor Attack (CBA) is shown to be stealthier than implanting the same multiple trigger keys in only a single component. CBA ensures that the backdoor is activated only when all trigger keys appear. Our experiments demonstrate that CBA is effective in both natural language processing (NLP) and multimodal tasks. For instance, with $3\%$ poisoning samples against the LLaMA-7B model on the Emotion dataset, our attack achieves a $100\%$ Attack Success Rate (ASR) with a False Triggered Rate (FTR) below $2.06\%$ and negligible model accuracy degradation. Our work highlights the necessity of increased security research on the trustworthiness of foundation LLMs.

cs.CR↗

Physical 3D Adversarial Attacks against Monocular Depth Estimation in Autonomous Driving

Deep learning-based monocular depth estimation (MDE), extensively applied in autonomous driving, is known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Previous physical attacks against MDE models rely on 2D adversarial patches, so they only affect a small, localized region in the MDE map but fail under various viewpoints. To address these limitations, we propose 3D Depth Fool (3D$^2$Fool), the first 3D texture-based adversarial attack against MDE models. 3D$^2$Fool is specifically optimized to generate 3D adversarial textures agnostic to model types of vehicles and to have improved robustness in bad weather conditions, such as rain and fog. Experimental results validate the superior performance of our 3D$^2$Fool across various scenarios, including vehicles, MDE models, weather conditions, and viewpoints. Real-world experiments with printed 3D textures on physical vehicle models further demonstrate that our 3D$^2$Fool can cause an MDE error of over 10 meters.

cs.CV↗

Quantization Aware Attack: Enhancing Transferable Adversarial Attacks by Model Quantization

Quantized neural networks (QNNs) have received increasing attention in resource-constrained scenarios due to their exceptional generalizability. However, their robustness against realistic black-box adversarial attacks has not been extensively studied. In this scenario, adversarial transferability is pursued across QNNs with different quantization bitwidths, which particularly involve unknown architectures and defense methods. Previous studies claim that transferability is difficult to achieve across QNNs with different bitwidths on the condition that they share the same architecture. However, we discover that under different architectures, transferability can be largely improved by using a QNN quantized with an extremely low bitwidth as the substitute model. We further improve the attack transferability by proposing \textit{quantization aware attack} (QAA), which fine-tunes a QNN substitute model with a multiple-bitwidth training objective. In particular, we demonstrate that QAA addresses the two issues that are commonly known to hinder transferability: 1) quantization shifts and 2) gradient misalignments. Extensive experimental results validate the high transferability of the QAA to diverse target models. For instance, when adopting the ResNet-34 substitute model on ImageNet, QAA outperforms the current best attack in attacking standardly trained DNNs, adversarially trained DNNs, and QNNs with varied bitwidths by 4.3\% $\sim$ 20.9\%, 8.7\% $\sim$ 15.5\%, and 2.6\% $\sim$ 31.1\% (absolute), respectively. In addition, QAA is efficient since it only takes one epoch for fine-tuning. In the end, we empirically explain the effectiveness of QAA from the view of the loss landscape. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyl-github-1896/QAA/

cs.CR↗

Towards Good Practices in Evaluating Transfer Adversarial Attacks

Transfer adversarial attacks raise critical security concerns in real-world, black-box scenarios. However, the actual progress of this field is difficult to assess due to two common limitations in existing evaluations. First, different methods are often not systematically and fairly evaluated in a one-to-one comparison. Second, only transferability is evaluated but another key attack property, stealthiness, is largely overlooked. In this work, we design good practices to address these limitations, and we present the first comprehensive evaluation of transfer attacks, covering 23 representative attacks against 9 defenses on ImageNet. In particular, we propose to categorize existing attacks into five categories, which enables our systematic category-wise analyses. These analyses lead to new findings that even challenge existing knowledge and also help determine the optimal attack hyperparameters for our attack-wise comprehensive evaluation. We also pay particular attention to stealthiness, by adopting diverse imperceptibility metrics and looking into new, finer-grained characteristics. Overall, our new insights into transferability and stealthiness lead to actionable good practices for future evaluations.

cs.CR↗

Prompt Backdoors in Visual Prompt Learning

Fine-tuning large pre-trained computer vision models is infeasible for resource-limited users. Visual prompt learning (VPL) has thus emerged to provide an efficient and flexible alternative to model fine-tuning through Visual Prompt as a Service (VPPTaaS). Specifically, the VPPTaaS provider optimizes a visual prompt given downstream data, and downstream users can use this prompt together with the large pre-trained model for prediction. However, this new learning paradigm may also pose security risks when the VPPTaaS provider instead provides a malicious visual prompt. In this paper, we take the first step to explore such risks through the lens of backdoor attacks. Specifically, we propose BadVisualPrompt, a simple yet effective backdoor attack against VPL. For example, poisoning $5\%$ CIFAR10 training data leads to above $99\%$ attack success rates with only negligible model accuracy drop by $1.5\%$. In particular, we identify and then address a new technical challenge related to interactions between the backdoor trigger and visual prompt, which does not exist in conventional, model-level backdoors. Moreover, we provide in-depth analyses of seven backdoor defenses from model, prompt, and input levels. Overall, all these defenses are either ineffective or impractical to mitigate our BadVisualPrompt, implying the critical vulnerability of VPL.

cs.CR↗

Turn Fake into Real: Adversarial Head Turn Attacks Against Deepfake Detection

Malicious use of deepfakes leads to serious public concerns and reduces people's trust in digital media. Although effective deepfake detectors have been proposed, they are substantially vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To evaluate the detector's robustness, recent studies have explored various attacks. However, all existing attacks are limited to 2D image perturbations, which are hard to translate into real-world facial changes. In this paper, we propose adversarial head turn (AdvHeat), the first attempt at 3D adversarial face views against deepfake detectors, based on face view synthesis from a single-view fake image. Extensive experiments validate the vulnerability of various detectors to AdvHeat in realistic, black-box scenarios. For example, AdvHeat based on a simple random search yields a high attack success rate of 96.8% with 360 searching steps. When additional query access is allowed, we can further reduce the step budget to 50. Additional analyses demonstrate that AdvHeat is better than conventional attacks on both the cross-detector transferability and robustness to defenses. The adversarial images generated by AdvHeat are also shown to have natural looks. Our code, including that for generating a multi-view dataset consisting of 360 synthetic views for each of 1000 IDs from FaceForensics++, is available at https://github.com/twowwj/AdvHeaT.

cs.CV↗

Image Shortcut Squeezing: Countering Perturbative Availability Poisons with Compression

Perturbative availability poisons (PAPs) add small changes to images to prevent their use for model training. Current research adopts the belief that practical and effective approaches to countering PAPs do not exist. In this paper, we argue that it is time to abandon this belief. We present extensive experiments showing that 12 state-of-the-art PAP methods are vulnerable to Image Shortcut Squeezing (ISS), which is based on simple compression. For example, on average, ISS restores the CIFAR-10 model accuracy to $81.73\%$, surpassing the previous best preprocessing-based countermeasures by $37.97\%$ absolute. ISS also (slightly) outperforms adversarial training and has higher generalizability to unseen perturbation norms and also higher efficiency. Our investigation reveals that the property of PAP perturbations depends on the type of surrogate model used for poison generation, and it explains why a specific ISS compression yields the best performance for a specific type of PAP perturbation. We further test stronger, adaptive poisoning, and show it falls short of being an ideal defense against ISS. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of considering various (simple) countermeasures to ensure the meaningfulness of analysis carried out during the development of PAP methods.

cs.CR↗

Adversarial Image Color Transformations in Explicit Color Filter Space

Deep Neural Networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial images. Conventional attacks strive for indistinguishable adversarial images with strictly restricted perturbations. Recently, researchers have moved to explore distinguishable yet non-suspicious adversarial images and demonstrated that color transformation attacks are effective. In this work, we propose Adversarial Color Filter (AdvCF), a novel color transformation attack that is optimized with gradient information in the parameter space of a simple color filter. In particular, our color filter space is explicitly specified so that we are able to provide a systematic analysis of model robustness against adversarial color transformations, from both the attack and defense perspectives. In contrast, existing color transformation attacks do not offer the opportunity for systematic analysis due to the lack of such an explicit space. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our AdvCF in fooling image classifiers and also compare it with other color transformation attacks regarding their robustness to defenses and image acceptability through an extensive user study. We also highlight the human-interpretability of AdvCF and show its superiority over the state-of-the-art human-interpretable color transformation attack on both image acceptability and efficiency. Additional results provide interesting new insights into model robustness against AdvCF in another three visual tasks.

cs.CV↗

Generative Watermarking Against Unauthorized Subject-Driven Image Synthesis

Large text-to-image models have shown remarkable performance in synthesizing high-quality images. In particular, the subject-driven model makes it possible to personalize the image synthesis for a specific subject, e.g., a human face or an artistic style, by fine-tuning the generic text-to-image model with a few images from that subject. Nevertheless, misuse of subject-driven image synthesis may violate the authority of subject owners. For example, malicious users may use subject-driven synthesis to mimic specific artistic styles or to create fake facial images without authorization. To protect subject owners against such misuse, recent attempts have commonly relied on adversarial examples to indiscriminately disrupt subject-driven image synthesis. However, this essentially prevents any benign use of subject-driven synthesis based on protected images. In this paper, we take a different angle and aim at protection without sacrificing the utility of protected images for general synthesis purposes. Specifically, we propose GenWatermark, a novel watermark system based on jointly learning a watermark generator and a detector. In particular, to help the watermark survive the subject-driven synthesis, we incorporate the synthesis process in learning GenWatermark by fine-tuning the detector with synthesized images for a specific subject. This operation is shown to largely improve the watermark detection accuracy and also ensure the uniqueness of the watermark for each individual subject. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GenWatermark, especially in practical scenarios with unknown models and text prompts (74% Acc.), as well as partial data watermarking (80% Acc. for 1/4 watermarking). We also demonstrate the robustness of GenWatermark to two potential countermeasures that substantially degrade the synthesis quality.

cs.CV↗

The Importance of Image Interpretation: Patterns of Semantic Misclassification in Real-World Adversarial Images

Adversarial images are created with the intention of causing an image classifier to produce a misclassification. In this paper, we propose that adversarial images should be evaluated based on semantic mismatch, rather than label mismatch, as used in current work. In other words, we propose that an image of a "mug" would be considered adversarial if classified as "turnip", but not as "cup", as current systems would assume. Our novel idea of taking semantic misclassification into account in the evaluation of adversarial images offers two benefits. First, it is a more realistic conceptualization of what makes an image adversarial, which is important in order to fully understand the implications of adversarial images for security and privacy. Second, it makes it possible to evaluate the transferability of adversarial images to a real-world classifier, without requiring the classifier's label set to have been available during the creation of the images. The paper carries out an evaluation of a transfer attack on a real-world image classifier that is made possible by our semantic misclassification approach. The attack reveals patterns in the semantics of adversarial misclassifications that could not be investigated using conventional label mismatch.

cs.CV↗

Generative Poisoning Using Random Discriminators

We introduce ShortcutGen, a new data poisoning attack that generates sample-dependent, error-minimizing perturbations by learning a generator. The key novelty of ShortcutGen is the use of a randomly-initialized discriminator, which provides spurious shortcuts needed for generating poisons. Different from recent, iterative methods, our ShortcutGen can generate perturbations with only one forward pass in a label-free manner, and compared to the only existing generative method, DeepConfuse, our ShortcutGen is faster and simpler to train while remaining competitive. We also demonstrate that integrating a simple augmentation strategy can further boost the robustness of ShortcutGen against early stopping, and combining augmentation and non-augmentation leads to new state-of-the-art results in terms of final validation accuracy, especially in the challenging, transfer scenario. Lastly, we speculate, through uncovering its working mechanism, that learning a more general representation space could allow ShortcutGen to work for unseen data.

cs.LG↗

Membership Inference Attacks by Exploiting Loss Trajectory

Machine learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks in which an adversary aims to predict whether or not a particular sample was contained in the target model's training dataset. Existing attack methods have commonly exploited the output information (mostly, losses) solely from the given target model. As a result, in practical scenarios where both the member and non-member samples yield similarly small losses, these methods are naturally unable to differentiate between them. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a new attack method, called \system, which can exploit the membership information from the whole training process of the target model for improving the attack performance. To mount the attack in the common black-box setting, we leverage knowledge distillation, and represent the membership information by the losses evaluated on a sequence of intermediate models at different distillation epochs, namely \emph{distilled loss trajectory}, together with the loss from the given target model. Experimental results over different datasets and model architectures demonstrate the great advantage of our attack in terms of different metrics. For example, on CINIC-10, our attack achieves at least 6$\times$ higher true-positive rate at a low false-positive rate of 0.1\% than existing methods. Further analysis demonstrates the general effectiveness of our attack in more strict scenarios.

cs.CR↗

Going Grayscale: The Road to Understanding and Improving Unlearnable Examples

Recent work has shown that imperceptible perturbations can be applied to craft unlearnable examples (ULEs), i.e. images whose content cannot be used to improve a classifier during training. In this paper, we reveal the road that researchers should follow for understanding ULEs and improving ULEs as they were originally formulated (ULEOs). The paper makes four contributions. First, we show that ULEOs exploit color and, consequently, their effects can be mitigated by simple grayscale pre-filtering, without resorting to adversarial training. Second, we propose an extension to ULEOs, which is called ULEO-GrayAugs, that forces the generated ULEs away from channel-wise color perturbations by making use of grayscale knowledge and data augmentations during optimization. Third, we show that ULEOs generated using Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are effective in the case of complex Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifiers, suggesting that CNNs suffer specific vulnerability to ULEs. Fourth, we demonstrate that when a classifier is trained on ULEOs, adversarial training will prevent a drop in accuracy measured both on clean images and on adversarial images. Taken together, our contributions represent a substantial advance in the state of art of unlearnable examples, but also reveal important characteristics of their behavior that must be better understood in order to achieve further improvements.

cs.CV↗

On Success and Simplicity: A Second Look at Transferable Targeted Attacks

Achieving transferability of targeted attacks is reputed to be remarkably difficult. Currently, state-of-the-art approaches are resource-intensive because they necessitate training model(s) for each target class with additional data. In our investigation, we find, however, that simple transferable attacks which require neither additional data nor model training can achieve surprisingly high targeted transferability. This insight has been overlooked until now, mainly due to the widespread practice of unreasonably restricting attack optimization to a limited number of iterations. In particular, we, for the first time, identify that a simple logit loss can yield competitive results with the state of the arts. Our analysis spans a variety of transfer settings, especially including three new, realistic settings: an ensemble transfer setting with little model similarity, a worse-case setting with low-ranked target classes, and also a real-world attack against the Google Cloud Vision API. Results in these new settings demonstrate that the commonly adopted, easy settings cannot fully reveal the actual properties of different attacks and may cause misleading comparisons. We also show the usefulness of the simple logit loss for generating targeted universal adversarial perturbations in a data-free and training-free manner. Overall, the aim of our analysis is to inspire a more meaningful evaluation on targeted transferability. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhengyuZhao/Targeted-Tansfer

cs.LG↗

Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents

Maintaining a consistent attribute profile is crucial for dialogue agents to naturally converse with humans. Existing studies on improving attribute consistency mainly explored how to incorporate attribute information in the responses, but few efforts have been made to identify the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. To facilitate the study of profile consistency identification, we create a large-scale human-annotated dataset with over 110K single-turn conversations and their key-value attribute profiles. Explicit relation between response and profile is manually labeled. We also propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency, and it gained improvements over strong baselines. Further evaluations on downstream tasks demonstrate that the profile consistency identification model is conducive for improving dialogue consistency.

cs.CL↗