# DANAA: Towards transferable attacks with double adversarial neuron attribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10427 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10427/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [Practical Black-Box Attacks against Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02697/) (2016)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [Black-box Adversarial Attacks with Limited Queries and Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08598/) (2018)
- [Evading Defenses to Transferable Adversarial Examples by Translation-Invariant Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02884/) (2019)
- [Generating Adversarial Examples with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02610/) (2018)
- [The Secret Revealer: Generative Model-Inversion Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07135/) (2019)
- [Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks through Variance Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15571/) (2021)
- [Prior Convictions: Black-Box Adversarial Attacks with Bandits and Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07978/) (2018)
- [Frequency Domain Model Augmentation for Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05382/) (2022)
- [Feature Importance-aware Transferable Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14185/) (2021)
- [Improving Black-box Adversarial Attacks with a Transfer-based Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06919/) (2019)
- [QEBA: Query-Efficient Boundary-Based Blackbox Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14137/) (2020)
- [Improving Adversarial Transferability via Neuron Attribution-Based Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00008/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Variance Reduced Ensemble Adversarial Attack for Boosting the Adversarial Transferability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10752/) (2021)
- [Patch-wise Attack for Fooling Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06765/) (2020)
- [Knowledge-Enriched Distributional Model Inversion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04092/) (2020)
- [Plug & Play Attacks: Towards Robust and Flexible Model Inversion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12179/) (2022)
- [FDA: Feature Disruptive Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04385/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [MFABA: A More Faithful and Accelerated Boundary-based Attribution Method for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13630/) (2023)
- [GE-AdvGAN: Improving the transferability of adversarial samples by gradient editing-based adversarial generative model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06031/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Transferable Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00418/) (2024)
- [DMS: Addressing Information Loss with More Steps for Pragmatic Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07580/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Information Consistency in Frequency and Spatial Domain for Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12670/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Transferability of Adversarial Attacks with GE-AdvGAN+: A Comprehensive Framework for Gradient Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12673/) (2024)
- [Devling into Adversarial Transferability on Image Classification: Review, Benchmark, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23117/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While deep neural networks have excellent results in many fields, they are susceptible to interference from attacking samples resulting in erroneous judgments. Feature-level attacks are one of the effective attack types, which targets the learnt features in the hidden layers to improve its transferability across different models. Yet it is observed that the transferability has been largely impacted by the neuron importance estimation results. In this paper, a double adversarial neuron attribution attack method, termed `DANAA', is proposed to obtain more accurate feature importance estimation. In our method, the model outputs are attributed to the middle layer based on an adversarial non-linear path. The goal is to measure the weight of individual neurons and retain the features that are more important towards transferability. We have conducted extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets to demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Davidjinzb/DANAA