Pixel Is Not a Barrier: An Effective Evasion Attack for Pixel-Domain Diffusion Models
On the map: Diffusion models → Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion Models have emerged as powerful generative models for high-quality image synthesis, with many subsequent image editing techniques based on them. However, the ease of text-based image editing introduces significant risks, such as malicious editing for scams or intellectual property infringement. Previous works have attempted to safeguard images from diffusion-based editing by adding imperceptible perturbations. These methods are costly and specifically target prevalent Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), while Pixel-domain Diffusion Models (PDMs) remain largely unexplored and robust against such attacks. Our work addresses this gap by proposing a novel attack framework, AtkPDM. AtkPDM is mainly composed of a feature representation attacking loss that exploits vulnerabilities in denoising UNets and a latent optimization strategy to enhance the naturalness of adversarial images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in attacking dominant PDM-based editing methods (e.g., SDEdit) while maintaining reasonable fidelity and robustness against common defense methods. Additionally, our framework is extensible to LDMs, achieving comparable performance to existing approaches.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2024.
Builds on
26 of 38 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2023Toward effective protection against diffusion based mimicry through score distillation2 Oct
- 2023JPEG Compressed Images Can Bypass Protections Against AI Editing5 Apr
- 2023Raising the Cost of Malicious AI-Powered Image Editing13 Feb
- 2023Adversarial Example Does Good: Preventing Painting Imitation from Diffusion Models via Adversarial Examples9 Feb
Other references · 22
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2014Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognitioncited by 15,267
- 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,029
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
- 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
- 2017Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attackscited by 6,326
- 2022DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusioncited by 3,006
- 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,903
10 more
- 2022Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusioncited by 1,099
- 2019Sliced Score Matching: A Scalable Approach to Density and Score Estimationcited by 381
- 2022Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Modelscited by 290
- 2023Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Modelscited by 200
- 2023StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Modelscited by 154
- 2020Perceptual Adversarial Robustness: Defense Against Unseen Threat Modelscited by 137
- 2023Nightshade: Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 72
- 2023LEDITS: Real Image Editing with DDPM Inversion and Semantic Guidancecited by 49
- 2017Optimal transport for Gaussian mixture modelscited by 45
- 2023Instruct2Attack: Language-Guided Semantic Adversarial Attackscited by 16
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 0; 2026: 2.
3 papers.
- 2024DiffVax: Optimization-Free Image Immunization Against Diffusion-Based Editingcited by 10
- 2026Adversarial Attacks for Good: A Survey of Proactive Protection across the Visual Content Lifecyclecited by 0
- 2026A Survey on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Models Across Multiple Modalitiescited by 0
- 2026A Survey on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Models Across Multiple Modalities28 Aug 2026
- 2026Adversarial Attacks for Good: A Survey of Proactive Protection across the Visual Content Lifecycle5 Aug 2026
- 2024DiffVax: Optimization-Free Image Immunization Against Diffusion-Based Editing27 Nov 2024
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024Pixel is a Barrier: Diffusion Models Are More Adversarially Robust Than We Think
- 2024DiffusionGuard: A Robust Defense Against Malicious Diffusion-based Image Editing
- 2024Attacks and Defenses for Generative Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey
- 2024Adversarial Attacks and Defenses on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey
- 2025DIA: The Adversarial Exposure of Deterministic Inversion in Diffusion Models
- 2023Diffusion Models for Imperceptible and Transferable Adversarial Attack
- 2023Intriguing Properties of Diffusion Models: An Empirical Study of the Natural Attack Capability in Text-to-Image Generative Models
- 2025DCT-Shield: A Robust Frequency Domain Defense against Malicious Image Editing