# MALT Powers Up Adversarial Attacks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02240 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02240/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07572/) (2018)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Practical Black-Box Attacks against Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02697/) (2016)
- [Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04508/) (2015)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Examples Are Not Easily Detected: Bypassing Ten Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07263/) (2017)
- [Minimally distorted Adversarial Examples with a Fast Adaptive Boundary Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02044/) (2019)
- [Uncovering the Limits of Adversarial Training against Norm-Bounded Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03593/) (2020)
- [PixelDefend: Leveraging Generative Models to Understand and Defend against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10766/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Risk and the Dangers of Evaluating Against Weak Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05666/) (2018)
- [Better Diffusion Models Further Improve Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04638/) (2023)
- [Disentangling Adversarial Robustness and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00740/) (2018)
- [A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12806/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Robustness through Local Linearization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02610/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Study on Robustness of Image Classification Models: Benchmarking and Rethinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14301/) (2023)
- [Adversarial examples from computational constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10204/) (2018)
- [Backpropagating Linearly Improves Transferability of Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03528/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Adversarial Training for ImageNet: Architectures, Training and Generalization across Threat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01870/) (2023)
- [Adversarial vulnerability for any classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08686/) (2018)
- [A Boundary Tilting Persepective on the Phenomenon of Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07690/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13948/) (2023)
- [On the Geometry of Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00525/) (2018)
- [The Dimpled Manifold Model of Adversarial Examples in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10151/) (2021)
- [A Simple Explanation for the Existence of Adversarial Examples with Small Hamming Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10861/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Provable Energy-Guided Test-Time Defense Boosting Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current adversarial attacks for multi-class classifiers choose the target class for a given input naively, based on the classifier's confidence levels for various target classes. We present a novel adversarial targeting method, textitMALT - Mesoscopic Almost Linearity Targeting, based on medium-scale almost linearity assumptions. Our attack wins over the current state of the art AutoAttack on the standard benchmark datasets CIFAR-100 and ImageNet and for a variety of robust models. In particular, our attack is five times faster than AutoAttack, while successfully matching all of AutoAttack's successes and attacking additional samples that were previously out of reach. We then prove formally and demonstrate empirically that our targeting method, although inspired by linear predictors, also applies to standard non-linear models.