Stealthy Multi-Task Adversarial Attacks

Deep neural networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, raising serious safety concerns in the real-world systems. While prior work mainly explores single-task attacks or jointly degrading all tasks in multi-task models, practical scenarios often demand more selective and stealthy attack strategies. To address this challenge, we propose Stealthy Multi-Task Adversarial Attack (SMTA2), a novel framework that selectively degrades a targeted task while strictly preserving the performance of non-targeted tasks. We formulate this objective as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem and design task-aware adversarial perturbations that maximize degradation on the targeted task without causing collateral damage on non-targeted tasks. To enhance practicality, we further introduce an automated loss-weight tuning strategy that dynamically balances attack and preservation objectives. Experiments on two multi-task benchmarks NYUv2 and Cityscapes demonstrate that SMTA2 achieves strong attack performance on targeted tasks while maintaining non-targeted tasks intact on both undefended and adversarially trained models, establishing the first systematic framework for stealthy and selective multi-task attack framework.