# DynamicPAE: Generating Scene-Aware Physical Adversarial Examples in Real-Time

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Characterizing possible failure modes in physics-informed neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01050/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [Are aligned neural networks adversarially aligned?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15447/) (2023)
- [Characterizing Adversarial Subspaces Using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02613/) (2018)
- [Generating Adversarial Examples with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02610/) (2018)
- [Kornia: an Open Source Differentiable Computer Vision Library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02190/) (2019)
- [Universally Slimmable Networks and Improved Training Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05134/) (2019)
- [Deep Potential Molecular Dynamics: a scalable model with the accuracy of quantum mechanics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09571/) (2017)
- [Physical Adversarial Examples for Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07769/) (2018)
- [Constructing Unrestricted Adversarial Examples with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07894/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [AdvSerial: Physical Adversarial Attacks on Infrastructure-mounted Pedestrian Detectors via Semantic Feature Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17069/) (2026)
- [Feature-Space Smoothing: Certified Robustness of Deep Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16200/) (2026)
- [Adversarial Flow Matching for Imperceptible Attacks on End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00880/) (2026)
- [AdvTiles: Physical Adversarial Camouflage Clothing against Person Detectors via Learnable Tiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06801/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Physical adversarial examples (PAEs) are regarded as whistle-blowers of real-world risks in deep-learning applications, thus worth further investigation. However, current PAE generation studies show limited adaptive attacking ability to diverse and varying scenes, revealing the urgent requirement of dynamic PAEs that are generated in real time and conditioned on the observation from the attacker. The key challenge in generating dynamic PAEs is learning the sparse relation between PAEs and the observation of attackers under the noisy feedback of attack training. To address the challenge, we present DynamicPAE, the first generative framework that enables scene-aware real-time physical attacks. Specifically, to address the noisy feedback problem that obfuscates the exploration of scene-related PAEs, we introduce the residual-guided adversarial pattern exploration technique. Residual-guided training, which relaxes the attack training with a reconstruction task, is proposed to enrich the feedback information, thereby achieving a more comprehensive exploration of PAEs. To address the alignment problem between the trained generator and the real-world scenario, we introduce the distribution-matched attack scenario alignment, consisting of the conditional-uncertainty-aligned data module and the skewness-aligned objective re-weighting module. The former aligns the training environment with the incomplete observation of the real-world attacker. The latter facilitates consistent stealth control across different attack targets with the skewness controller. Extensive digital and physical evaluations demonstrate the superior attack performance of DynamicPAE, attaining a 2.07 × boost (58.8% average AP drop under attack) on representative object detectors (e.g., DETR) over state-of-the-art static PAE generating methods. Overall, our work opens the door to end-to-end modeling of dynamic PAEs.
