# Any Target Can be Offense: Adversarial Example Generation via Generalized Latent Infection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12292 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12292/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [Countering Adversarial Images using Input Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00117/) (2017)
- [Evading Defenses to Transferable Adversarial Examples by Translation-Invariant Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02884/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Adversarial Effects Through Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01991/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A Self-supervised Approach for Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04924/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02328/) (2017)
- [ComDefend: An Efficient Image Compression Model to Defend Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12673/) (2018)
- [Patch-wise Attack for Fooling Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06765/) (2020)
- [On Improving Adversarial Transferability of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04169/) (2021)

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

- [Rethinking Target Label Conditioning in Adversarial Attacks: A 2D Tensor-Guided Generative Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14137/) (2025)
- [Towards Cross-Domain Multi-Targeted Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20782/) (2025)
- [Improving Sustainability of Adversarial Examples in Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09088/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Targeted adversarial attack, which aims to mislead a model to recognize any image as a target object by imperceptible perturbations, has become a mainstream tool for vulnerability assessment of deep neural networks (DNNs). Since existing targeted attackers only learn to attack known target classes, they cannot generalize well to unknown classes. To tackle this issue, we propose bfGeneralized bfAdversarial attacbfKER (bfGAKer), which is able to construct adversarial examples to any target class. The core idea behind GAKer is to craft a latently infected representation during adversarial example generation. To this end, the extracted latent representations of the target object are first injected into intermediate features of an input image in an adversarial generator. Then, the generator is optimized to ensure visual consistency with the input image while being close to the target object in the feature space. Since the GAKer is class-agnostic yet model-agnostic, it can be regarded as a general tool that not only reveals the vulnerability of more DNNs but also identifies deficiencies of DNNs in a wider range of classes. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method in generating adversarial examples for both known and unknown classes. Notably, compared with other generative methods, our method achieves an approximately 14.13% higher attack success rate for unknown classes and an approximately 4.23% higher success rate for known classes. Our code is available in https://github.com/VL-Group/GAKer.