Towards Evaluating Transfer-based Attacks Systematically, Practically, and Fairly
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Abstract (arXiv)
The adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has drawn great attention due to the security risk of applying these models in real-world applications. Based on transferability of adversarial examples, an increasing number of transfer-based methods have been developed to fool black-box DNN models whose architecture and parameters are inaccessible. Although tremendous effort has been exerted, there still lacks a standardized benchmark that could be taken advantage of to compare these methods systematically, fairly, and practically. Our investigation shows that the evaluation of some methods needs to be more reasonable and more thorough to verify their effectiveness, to avoid, for example, unfair comparison and insufficient consideration of possible substitute/victim models. Therefore, we establish a transfer-based attack benchmark (TA-Bench) which implements 30+ methods. In this paper, we evaluate and compare them comprehensively on 25 popular substitute/victim models on ImageNet. New insights about the effectiveness of these methods are gained and guidelines for future evaluations are provided. Code at: https://github.com/qizhangli/TA-Bench.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 67 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2023.
Builds on
67 of 76 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
6 papers.
- 2024Improved Generation of Adversarial Examples Against Safety-aligned LLMscited by 17
- 2025Use as Many Surrogates as You Want: Selective Ensemble Attack to Unleash Transferability without Sacrificing Resource Efficiencycited by 1
- 2023The Ultimate Combo: Boosting Adversarial Example Transferability by Composing Data Augmentationscited by 0
- 2025Seeking Flat Minima over Diverse Surrogates for Improved Adversarial Transferability: A Theoretical Framework and Algorithmic Instantiationcited by 0
- 2025On the Trade-Off Between Transparency and Security in Adversarial Machine Learningcited by 0
- 2026Devling into Adversarial Transferability on Image Classification: Review, Benchmark, and Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Devling into Adversarial Transferability on Image Classification: Review, Benchmark, and Evaluation26 Feb 2026
- 2025On the Trade-Off Between Transparency and Security in Adversarial Machine Learning14 Nov 2025
- 2025Use as Many Surrogates as You Want: Selective Ensemble Attack to Unleash Transferability without Sacrificing Resource Efficiency19 May 2025
- 2025Seeking Flat Minima over Diverse Surrogates for Improved Adversarial Transferability: A Theoretical Framework and Algorithmic Instantiation23 Apr 2025
- 2024Improved Generation of Adversarial Examples Against Safety-aligned LLMs28 May 2024
- 2023The Ultimate Combo: Boosting Adversarial Example Transferability by Composing Data Augmentations18 Dec 2023