# One-Index Vector Quantization Based Adversarial Attack on Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01282/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Practical Black-Box Attacks against Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02697/) (2016)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [ZOO: Zeroth Order Optimization based Black-box Attacks to Deep Neural Networks without Training Substitute Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03999/) (2017)
- [One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08864/) (2017)
- [AutoZOOM: Autoencoder-based Zeroth Order Optimization Method for Attacking Black-box Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11770/) (2018)
- [On the Design Fundamentals of Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04542/) (2023)
- [Hard No-Box Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition with Skeleton-Motion-Informed Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05681/) (2023)
- [Perceptual Quality-preserving Black-Box Attack against Deep Learning Image Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07776/) (2019)
- [Perturbation Analysis of Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01456/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Image Generation by Spatial Transformation in Perceptual Colorspaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13950/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Investigating Adversarial Robustness of Heterogeneous Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17856/) (2026)
- [A Comprehensive Review of One-Pixel Attack: Research Status, Taxonomy, Applications, Regulation Policy and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00125/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To improve storage and transmission, images are generally compressed. Vector quantization (VQ) is a popular compression method as it has a high compression ratio that suppresses other compression techniques. Despite this, existing adversarial attack methods on image classification are mostly performed in the pixel domain with few exceptions in the compressed domain, making them less applicable in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel one-index attack method in the VQ domain to generate adversarial images by a differential evolution algorithm, successfully resulting in image misclassification in victim models. The one-index attack method modifies a single index in the compressed data stream so that the decompressed image is misclassified. It only needs to modify a single VQ index to realize an attack, which limits the number of perturbed indexes. The proposed method belongs to a semi-black-box attack, which is more in line with the actual attack scenario. We apply our method to attack three popular image classification models, i.e., Resnet, NIN, and VGG16. On average, 55.9% and 77.4% of the images in CIFAR-10 and Fashion MNIST, respectively, are successfully attacked, with a high level of misclassification confidence and a low level of image perturbation.