# Discriminator-Free Generative Adversarial Attack

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08864/) (2017)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [Transferability in Machine Learning: from Phenomena to Black-Box Attacks using Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07277/) (2016)
- [Generating Adversarial Examples with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02610/) (2018)
- [Harmonious Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08122/) (2018)
- [Person Re-identification: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02984/) (2016)
- [Image-Image Domain Adaptation with Preserved Self-Similarity and Domain-Dissimilarity for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07027/) (2017)
- [EAD: Elastic-Net Attacks to Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04114/) (2017)
- [advertorch v0.1: An Adversarial Robustness Toolbox based on PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07623/) (2019)
- [Camera Style Adaptation for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10295/) (2017)
- [AlignedReID: Surpassing Human-Level Performance in Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08184/) (2017)
- [Multi-scale Deep Learning Architectures for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05165/) (2017)
- [Transferable, Controllable, and Inconspicuous Adversarial Attacks on Person Re-identification With Deep Mis-Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04199/) (2020)
- [Universal Perturbation Attack Against Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00552/) (2018)
- [Angular Visual Hardness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02279/) (2019)
- [Targeted Mismatch Adversarial Attack: Query with a Flower to Retrieve the Tower](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09163/) (2019)
- [Who's Afraid of Adversarial Queries? The Impact of Image Modifications on Content-based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10332/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Physical Backdoor Attacks to Lane Detection Systems in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00858/) (2022)
- [GAMA: Generative Adversarial Multi-Object Scene Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09502/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Local Patch Differences in Multi-Object Scenes for Generative Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09883/) (2022)
- [Leveraging GAN Priors for Few-Shot Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13428/) (2022)
- [DifAttack++: Query-Efficient Black-Box Adversarial Attack via Hierarchical Disentangled Feature Space in Cross-Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03017/) (2024)
- [Symmetric Saliency-based Adversarial Attack To Speaker Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16777/) (2022)
- [DifAttack: Query-Efficient Black-Box Attack via Disentangled Feature Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14585/) (2023)
- [A Generative Adversarial Approach to Adversarial Attacks Guided by Contrastive Language-Image Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01317/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Deep Neural Networks are vulnerable toadversarial exam-ples(Figure 1), making the DNNs-based systems collapsed byadding the inconspicuous perturbations to the images. Most of the existing works for adversarial attack are gradient-based and suf-fer from the latency efficiencies and the load on GPU memory. Thegenerative-based adversarial attacks can get rid of this limitation,and some relative works propose the approaches based on GAN.However, suffering from the difficulty of the convergence of train-ing a GAN, the adversarial examples have either bad attack abilityor bad visual quality. In this work, we find that the discriminatorcould be not necessary for generative-based adversarial attack, andpropose theSymmetric Saliency-based Auto-Encoder (SSAE)to generate the perturbations, which is composed of the saliencymap module and the angle-norm disentanglement of the featuresmodule. The advantage of our proposed method lies in that it is notdepending on discriminator, and uses the generative saliency map to pay more attention to label-relevant regions. The extensive exper-iments among the various tasks, datasets, and models demonstratethat the adversarial examples generated by SSAE not only make thewidely-used models collapse, but also achieves good visual quality.The code is available at https://github.com/BravoLu/SSAE.