Random Position Adversarial Patch for Vision Transformers

Previous studies have shown the vulnerability of vision transformers to adversarial patches, but these studies all rely on a critical assumption: the attack patches must be perfectly aligned with the patches used for linear projection in vision transformers. Due to this stringent requirement, deploying adversarial patches for vision transformers in the physical world becomes impractical, unlike their effectiveness on CNNs. This paper proposes a novel method for generating an adversarial patch (G-Patch) that overcomes the alignment constraint, allowing the patch to launch a targeted attack at any position within the field of view. Specifically, instead of directly optimizing the patch using gradients, we employ a GAN-like structure to generate the adversarial patch. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the adversarial patch in achieving universal attacks on vision transformers, both in digital and physical-world scenarios. Additionally, further analysis reveals that the generated adversarial patch exhibits robustness to brightness restriction, color transfer, and random noise. Real-world attack experiments validate the effectiveness of the G-Patch to launch robust attacks even under some very challenging conditions.