How Deep Learning Sees the World: A Survey on Adversarial Attacks & Defenses
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Abstract (arXiv)
Deep Learning is currently used to perform multiple tasks, such as object recognition, face recognition, and natural language processing. However, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to perturbations that alter the network prediction (adversarial examples), raising concerns regarding its usage in critical areas, such as self-driving vehicles, malware detection, and healthcare. This paper compiles the most recent adversarial attacks, grouped by the attacker capacity, and modern defenses clustered by protection strategies. We also present the new advances regarding Vision Transformers, summarize the datasets and metrics used in the context of adversarial settings, and compare the state-of-the-art results under different attacks, finishing with the identification of open issues.
Key facts. Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 153 of its 248 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 May 2023.
Builds on
153 of 248 references.
References · 153
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- 2017Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learningcited by 935
- 2016Adversarial Machine Learning at Scalecited by 934
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- 2019Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random searchcited by 682
- 2015Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations against Deep Neural Networkscited by 675
- 2020RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmarkcited by 659
- 2019Adversarial Training for Free!cited by 638
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- 2020Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learningcited by 504
- 2018Black-box Adversarial Attacks with Limited Queries and Informationcited by 499
- 2017Feature Squeezing: Detecting Adversarial Examples in Deep Neural Networkscited by 484
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50 most cited of 153 All 153 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 19; 2025: 30; 2026: 14.
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- 2024AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Promptingcited by 113
- 2023Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language modelscited by 72
- 2024Efficient Generation of Targeted and Transferable Adversarial Examples for Vision-Language Models Via Diffusion Modelscited by 36
- 2024Adversarial Attacks of Vision Tasks in the Past 10 Years: A Surveycited by 22
- 2024A Survey on Diffusion Models for Recommender Systemscited by 20
- 2024SleeperNets: Universal Backdoor Poisoning Attacks Against Reinforcement Learning Agentscited by 19
- 2025One Surrogate to Fool Them All: Universal, Transferable, and Targeted Adversarial Attacks with CLIPcited by 15
- 2025MIP against Agent: Malicious Image Patches Hijacking Multimodal OS Agentscited by 12
- 2024OSLO: One-Shot Label-Only Membership Inference Attackscited by 11
- 2024Adaptive Randomized Smoothing: Certified Adversarial Robustness for Multi-Step Defencescited by 9
- 2024Machine Learning Robustness: A Primercited by 8
- 2024A Survey and Evaluation of Adversarial Attacks for Object Detectioncited by 7
38 more
- 2025Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superpositioncited by 7
- 2024Out-of-Distribution Data: An Acquaintance of Adversarial Examples -- A Surveycited by 6
- 2024Hijacking Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents with Adversarial Environmental Attackscited by 5
- 2025Unified Prompt Attack Against Text-to-Image Generation Modelscited by 5
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learningcited by 5
- 2024Breaking the Illusion: Real-world Challenges for Adversarial Patches in Object Detectioncited by 4
- 2025Does Low Rank Adaptation Lead to Lower Robustness against Training-Time Attacks?cited by 4
- 2024Classification under strategic adversary manipulation using pessimistic bilevel optimisationcited by 2
- 2024Derivative-Free Diffusion Manifold-Constrained Gradient for Unified XAIcited by 2
- 2025Towards Robust Stability Prediction in Smart Grids: GAN-based Approach under Data Constraints and Adversarial Challengescited by 2
- 20251-Lipschitz Network Initialization for Certifiably Robust Classification Applications: A Decay Problemcited by 2
- 2025Stop Walking in Circles! Bailing Out Early in Projected Gradient Descentcited by 2
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Physical Risk Control in the Era of Foundation Model-enabled Roboticscited by 2
- 2025Are Time-Series Foundation Models Deployment-Ready? A Systematic Study of Adversarial Robustness Across Domainscited by 2
- 2025Bridging the Task Gap: Multi-Task Adversarial Transferability in CLIP and Its Derivativescited by 2
- 2023Rapid Plug-in Defenderscited by 1
- 2024Harmonic Machine Learning Models are Robustcited by 1
- 2024Resilience in Knowledge Graph Embeddingscited by 1
- 2024Brain-like emergent properties in deep networks: impact of network architecture, datasets and trainingcited by 1
- 2024Pre-trained Multiple Latent Variable Generative Models are good defenders against Adversarial Attackscited by 1
- 2025Topological Signatures of Adversaries in Multimodal Alignmentscited by 1
- 2025Democratic Training Against Universal Adversarial Perturbationscited by 1
- 2025Cross-Model Transferability of Adversarial Patches in Real-time Segmentation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 1
- 2025A Survey of Adversarial Defenses in Vision-based Systems: Categorization, Methods and Challengescited by 1
- 2025ReLATE: Resilient Learner Selection for Multivariate Time-Series Classification Against Adversarial Attackscited by 1
- 2025Input-Specific and Universal Adversarial Attack Generation for Spiking Neural Networks in the Spiking Domaincited by 1
- 2025Active Adversarial Noise Suppression for Image Forgery Localizationcited by 1
- 2025Counterfactual Visual Explanation via Causally-Guided Adversarial Steeringcited by 1
- 2025Forecasting Fails: Unveiling Evasion Attacks in Weather Prediction Modelscited by 1
- 2025Bridging Efficiency and Safety: Formal Verification of Neural Networks with Early Exitscited by 1
- 2026Shapes are not enough: CONSERVAttack and its use for finding vulnerabilities and uncertainties in machine learning applicationscited by 1
- 2026INTARG: Informed Real-Time Adversarial Attack Generation for Time-Series Regressioncited by 1
- 2026MoCo-EA: Exploiting Adversarial Mode Connectivity for Efficient Evolutionary Attackscited by 1
- 2024Robust Network Learning via Inverse Scale Variational Sparsificationcited by 0
- 2025ProARD: progressive adversarial robustness distillation: provide wide range of robust studentscited by 0
- 2025Learning from Peers: Collaborative Ensemble Adversarial Trainingcited by 0
- 2025Breaking SafetyCore: Exploring the Risks of On-Device AI Deploymentcited by 0
- 2025Countering adversarial evasion in regression analysiscited by 0
50 most cited of 65 All 65 (JSON)
- 2026On the Effect of Bit-Level Parameter Perturbations in Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models14 Aug 2026
- 2026Large-scale Testing Global Optimization Methods with Black-box Adversarial Attacks13 Aug 2026
- 2026Adversarial Attacks on Online Handwriting using Salience-based Temporal Editing14 Jul 2026
- 2026Self-Review Reinforcement Learning (SRRL) with Cross-Episode Memory and Policy Distillation6 Jul 2026
- 2026MoCo-EA: Exploiting Adversarial Mode Connectivity for Efficient Evolutionary Attacks18 May 2026
- 2026Trapping Attacker in Dilemma: Examining Internal Correlations and External Influences of Trigger for Defending GNN Backdoors8 May 2026
- 2026INTARG: Informed Real-Time Adversarial Attack Generation for Time-Series Regression13 Apr 2026
- 2026Detection of Adversarial Attacks in Robotic Perception30 Mar 2026
- 2026Architecture-Agnostic Feature Synergy for Universal Defense Against Heterogeneous Generative Threats16 Mar 2026
- 2026Shapes are not enough: CONSERVAttack and its use for finding vulnerabilities and uncertainties in machine learning applications14 Mar 2026
- 2026Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning for IoT: A Cross-Paradigm Survey and Future Roadmap13 Mar 2026
- 2026Triggering hallucinations in model-based MRI reconstruction via adversarial perturbations20 Feb 2026
38 more
- 2026Improving Detection of Rare Nodes in Hierarchical Multi-Label Learning9 Feb 2026
- 2026Universal Adversarial Purification with DDIM Metric Loss for Stable Diffusion12 Jan 2026
- 2025Bridging Efficiency and Safety: Formal Verification of Neural Networks with Early Exits23 Dec 2025
- 2025Empirical evaluation of the Frank-Wolfe methods for constructing white-box adversarial attacks11 Dec 2025
- 2025Forecasting Fails: Unveiling Evasion Attacks in Weather Prediction Models9 Dec 2025
- 2025Physically Realistic Sequence-Level Adversarial Clothing for Robust Human-Detection Evasion20 Nov 2025
- 2025Bilevel Models for Adversarial Learning and A Case Study29 Oct 2025
- 2025Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition13 Oct 2025
- 2025Bridging the Task Gap: Multi-Task Adversarial Transferability in CLIP and Its Derivatives28 Sep 2025
- 2025Adversarial training with restricted data manipulation26 Sep 2025
- 2025Countering adversarial evasion in regression analysis26 Sep 2025
- 2025Breaking SafetyCore: Exploring the Risks of On-Device AI Deployment8 Sep 2025
- 2025Learning from Peers: Collaborative Ensemble Adversarial Training27 Aug 2025
- 2025Counterfactual Visual Explanation via Causally-Guided Adversarial Steering14 Jul 2025
- 2025Active Adversarial Noise Suppression for Image Forgery Localization15 Jun 2025
- 2025ProARD: progressive adversarial robustness distillation: provide wide range of robust students9 Jun 2025
- 2025One Surrogate to Fool Them All: Universal, Transferable, and Targeted Adversarial Attacks with CLIP26 May 2025
- 2025Are Time-Series Foundation Models Deployment-Ready? A Systematic Study of Adversarial Robustness Across Domains26 May 2025
- 2025Does Low Rank Adaptation Lead to Lower Robustness against Training-Time Attacks?19 May 2025
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Physical Risk Control in the Era of Foundation Model-enabled Robotics19 May 2025
- 2025Input-Specific and Universal Adversarial Attack Generation for Spiking Neural Networks in the Spiking Domain7 May 2025
- 2025Stop Walking in Circles! Bailing Out Early in Projected Gradient Descent25 Mar 2025
- 2025MIP against Agent: Malicious Image Patches Hijacking Multimodal OS Agents13 Mar 2025
- 2025ReLATE: Resilient Learner Selection for Multivariate Time-Series Classification Against Adversarial Attacks10 Mar 2025
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learning6 Mar 2025
- 2025A Survey of Adversarial Defenses in Vision-based Systems: Categorization, Methods and Challenges1 Mar 2025
- 20251-Lipschitz Network Initialization for Certifiably Robust Classification Applications: A Decay Problem28 Feb 2025
- 2025Unified Prompt Attack Against Text-to-Image Generation Models23 Feb 2025
- 2025Cross-Model Transferability of Adversarial Patches in Real-time Segmentation for Autonomous Driving22 Feb 2025
- 2025Democratic Training Against Universal Adversarial Perturbations8 Feb 2025
- 2025Topological Signatures of Adversaries in Multimodal Alignments29 Jan 2025
- 2025Towards Robust Stability Prediction in Smart Grids: GAN-based Approach under Data Constraints and Adversarial Challenges27 Jan 2025
- 2024Pre-trained Multiple Latent Variable Generative Models are good defenders against Adversarial Attacks4 Dec 2024
- 2024Hijacking Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents with Adversarial Environmental Attacks3 Dec 2024
- 2024Brain-like emergent properties in deep networks: impact of network architecture, datasets and training25 Nov 2024
- 2024Derivative-Free Diffusion Manifold-Constrained Gradient for Unified XAI22 Nov 2024
- 2024Adversarial Attacks of Vision Tasks in the Past 10 Years: A Survey31 Oct 2024
- 2024Resilience in Knowledge Graph Embeddings28 Oct 2024
50 newest of 65 All 65 (JSON)
- 2024AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Promptingcited by 113
- 2024Efficient Generation of Targeted and Transferable Adversarial Examples for Vision-Language Models Via Diffusion Modelscited by 36
- 2024Adversarial Attacks of Vision Tasks in the Past 10 Years: A Surveycited by 22
- 2025Bridging the Task Gap: Multi-Task Adversarial Transferability in CLIP and Its Derivativescited by 2
- 2025Bridging the Task Gap: Multi-Task Adversarial Transferability in CLIP and Its Derivatives28 Sep 2025
- 2024Adversarial Attacks of Vision Tasks in the Past 10 Years: A Survey31 Oct 2024
- 2024Efficient Generation of Targeted and Transferable Adversarial Examples for Vision-Language Models Via Diffusion Models16 Apr 2024
- 2024AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting14 Mar 2024
- 2024SleeperNets: Universal Backdoor Poisoning Attacks Against Reinforcement Learning Agentscited by 19
- 2024OSLO: One-Shot Label-Only Membership Inference Attackscited by 11
- 2025Unified Prompt Attack Against Text-to-Image Generation Modelscited by 5
- 2025Does Low Rank Adaptation Lead to Lower Robustness against Training-Time Attacks?cited by 4
- 2025Does Low Rank Adaptation Lead to Lower Robustness against Training-Time Attacks?19 May 2025
- 2025Unified Prompt Attack Against Text-to-Image Generation Models23 Feb 2025
- 2024SleeperNets: Universal Backdoor Poisoning Attacks Against Reinforcement Learning Agents30 May 2024
- 2024OSLO: One-Shot Label-Only Membership Inference Attacks27 May 2024
- 2023Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language modelscited by 72
- 2025One Surrogate to Fool Them All: Universal, Transferable, and Targeted Adversarial Attacks with CLIPcited by 15
- 2024Adaptive Randomized Smoothing: Certified Adversarial Robustness for Multi-Step Defencescited by 9
- 2024Machine Learning Robustness: A Primercited by 8
- 2024A Survey and Evaluation of Adversarial Attacks for Object Detectioncited by 7
- 2025Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superpositioncited by 7
- 2024Out-of-Distribution Data: An Acquaintance of Adversarial Examples -- A Surveycited by 6
- 2024Hijacking Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents with Adversarial Environmental Attackscited by 5
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learningcited by 5
- 2024Breaking the Illusion: Real-world Challenges for Adversarial Patches in Object Detectioncited by 4
- 2024Classification under strategic adversary manipulation using pessimistic bilevel optimisationcited by 2
- 2024Derivative-Free Diffusion Manifold-Constrained Gradient for Unified XAIcited by 2
12 most cited of 53 All 53 (JSON)
- 2026On the Effect of Bit-Level Parameter Perturbations in Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models14 Aug 2026
- 2026Large-scale Testing Global Optimization Methods with Black-box Adversarial Attacks13 Aug 2026
- 2026Adversarial Attacks on Online Handwriting using Salience-based Temporal Editing14 Jul 2026
- 2026Self-Review Reinforcement Learning (SRRL) with Cross-Episode Memory and Policy Distillation6 Jul 2026
- 2026MoCo-EA: Exploiting Adversarial Mode Connectivity for Efficient Evolutionary Attacks18 May 2026
- 2026Trapping Attacker in Dilemma: Examining Internal Correlations and External Influences of Trigger for Defending GNN Backdoors8 May 2026
- 2026INTARG: Informed Real-Time Adversarial Attack Generation for Time-Series Regression13 Apr 2026
- 2026Detection of Adversarial Attacks in Robotic Perception30 Mar 2026
- 2026Architecture-Agnostic Feature Synergy for Universal Defense Against Heterogeneous Generative Threats16 Mar 2026
- 2026Shapes are not enough: CONSERVAttack and its use for finding vulnerabilities and uncertainties in machine learning applications14 Mar 2026
- 2026Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning for IoT: A Cross-Paradigm Survey and Future Roadmap13 Mar 2026
- 2026Triggering hallucinations in model-based MRI reconstruction via adversarial perturbations20 Feb 2026
12 newest of 53 All 53 (JSON)