# Transferable and Undefendable Point Cloud Attacks via Medial Axis Transform

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18870 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18870/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

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

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [PU-Net: Point Cloud Upsampling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06761/) (2018)
- [Walk in the Cloud: Learning Curves for Point Clouds Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01288/) (2021)
- [PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10739/) (2024)
- [PU-GAN: a Point Cloud Upsampling Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10844/) (2019)
- [Generating 3D Adversarial Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07016/) (2018)
- [PointCloud Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01687/) (2018)
- [Extending Adversarial Attacks and Defenses to Deep 3D Point Cloud Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03006/) (2019)
- [AdvPC: Transferable Adversarial Perturbations on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00461/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Attack and Defense on Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10899/) (2019)
- [Mamba3D: Enhancing Local Features for 3D Point Cloud Analysis via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14966/) (2024)
- [Robustness of 3D Deep Learning in an Adversarial Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00923/) (2019)
- [Shape-invariant 3D Adversarial Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04041/) (2022)
- [On Isometry Robustness of Deep 3D Point Cloud Models under Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12222/) (2020)
- [Point2Skeleton: Learning Skeletal Representations from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00230/) (2020)
- [Imperceptible Transfer Attack and Defense on 3D Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10990/) (2021)
- [Hide in Thicket: Generating Imperceptible and Rational Adversarial Perturbations on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05247/) (2024)
- [Boosting 3D Adversarial Attacks with Attacking On Frequency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10937/) (2022)
- [PolyNet: Polynomial Neural Network for 3D Shape Recognition with PolyShape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07882/) (2021)
- [Improving transferability of 3D adversarial attacks with scale and shear transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01093/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Rethinking Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Point Clouds from a Compact Subspace Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23102/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Studying adversarial attacks on point clouds is essential for evaluating and improving the robustness of 3D deep learning models. However, most existing attack methods are developed under ideal white-box settings and often suffer from limited transferability to unseen models and insufficient robustness against common defense mechanisms. In this paper, we propose MAT-Adv, a novel adversarial attack framework that enhances both transferability and undefendability by explicitly perturbing the medial axis transform (MAT) representations, in order to induce inherent adversarialness in the resulting point clouds. Specifically, we employ an autoencoder to project input point clouds into compact MAT representations that capture the intrinsic geometric structure of point clouds. By perturbing these intrinsic representations, MAT-Adv introduces structural-level adversarial characteristics that remain effective across diverse models and defense strategies. To mitigate overfitting and prevent perturbation collapse, we incorporate a dropout strategy into the optimization of MAT perturbations, further improving transferability and undefendability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAT-Adv significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both transferability and undefendability. Codes will be made public upon paper acceptance.