# Improving Transferable Targeted Adversarial Attack via Normalized Logit Calibration and Truncated Feature Mixing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [Fast is better than free: Revisiting adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03994/) (2020)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Evading Defenses to Transferable Adversarial Examples by Translation-Invariant Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02884/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Spatial Dimensions of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16302/) (2021)
- [Nesterov Accelerated Gradient and Scale Invariance for Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06281/) (2019)
- [Defense against Adversarial Attacks Using High-Level Representation Guided Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02976/) (2017)
- [Do Adversarially Robust ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08489/) (2020)
- [Feature Denoising for Improving Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03411/) (2018)
- [Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks through Variance Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15571/) (2021)
- [Improving Adversarial Robustness via Promoting Ensemble Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08846/) (2019)
- [Eigen-CAM: Class Activation Map using Principal Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00299/) (2020)
- [A Self-supervised Approach for Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04924/) (2020)
- [Enhancing Adversarial Example Transferability with an Intermediate Level Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10823/) (2019)
- [Frequency Domain Model Augmentation for Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05382/) (2022)
- [On Success and Simplicity: A Second Look at Transferable Targeted Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11207/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Improving Sustainability of Adversarial Examples in Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09088/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Vulnerability Transcends Computational Paradigms: Feature Engineering Provides No Defense Against Neural Adversarial Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21323/) (2026)
- [The Scissors Effect: When Resize-Based Input Diversity Helps or Hurts Transfer Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22516/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to enhance the transferability of adversarial samples in targeted attacks, where attack success rates remain comparatively low. To achieve this objective, we propose two distinct techniques for improving the targeted transferability from the loss and feature aspects. First, in previous approaches, logit calibrations used in targeted attacks primarily focus on the logit margin between the targeted class and the untargeted classes among samples, neglecting the standard deviation of the logit. In contrast, we introduce a new normalized logit calibration method that jointly considers the logit margin and the standard deviation of logits. This approach effectively calibrates the logits, enhancing the targeted transferability. Second, previous studies have demonstrated that mixing the features of clean samples during optimization can significantly increase transferability. Building upon this, we further investigate a truncated feature mixing method to reduce the impact of the source training model, resulting in additional improvements. The truncated feature is determined by removing the Rank-1 feature associated with the largest singular value decomposed from the high-level convolutional layers of the clean sample. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet-Compatible and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate the individual and mutual benefits of our proposed two components, which outperform the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in black-box targeted attacks.