# Towards Cross-Domain Multi-Targeted Adversarial Attacks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20782/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [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)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [Evading Defenses to Transferable Adversarial Examples by Translation-Invariant Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02884/) (2019)
- [Do Adversarially Robust ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08489/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02328/) (2017)
- [Understanding and Mitigating the Tradeoff Between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10716/) (2020)
- [Generalizable Data-free Objective for Crafting Universal Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08092/) (2018)
- [Zipformer: A faster and better encoder for automatic speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11230/) (2023)
- [Fast Feature Fool: A data independent approach to universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05572/) (2017)
- [Semi-supervised Medical Image Classification with Relation-driven Self-ensembling Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07377/) (2020)
- [Transferable Perturbations of Deep Feature Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12519/) (2020)
- [Beyond ImageNet Attack: Towards Crafting Adversarial Examples for Black-box Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11528/) (2022)
- [An Adaptive Model Ensemble Adversarial Attack for Boosting Adversarial Transferability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02897/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-targeted adversarial attacks aim to mislead classifiers toward specific target classes using a single perturbation generator with a conditional input specifying the desired target class. Existing methods face two key limitations: (1) a single generator supports only a limited number of predefined target classes, and (2) it requires access to the victim model's training data to learn target class semantics. This dependency raises data leakage concerns in practical black-box scenarios where the training data is typically private. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Cross-Domain Multi-Targeted Attack (CD-MTA) that can generate perturbations toward arbitrary target classes, even those that do not exist in the attacker's training data. CD-MTA is trained on a single public dataset but can perform targeted attacks on black-box models trained on different datasets with disjoint and unknown class sets. Our method requires only a single example image that visually represents the desired target class, without relying its label, class distribution or pretrained embeddings. We achieve this through a Feature Injection Module (FIM) and class-agnostic objectives which guide the generator to extract transferable, fine-grained features from the target image without inferring class semantics. Experiments on ImageNet and seven additional datasets show that CD-MTA outperforms existing multi-targeted attack methods on unseen target classes in black-box and cross-domain scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/tgoncalv/CD-MTA.