# Latent Danger Zone: Distilling Unified Attention for Cross-Architecture Black-box Attacks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19044 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19044/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 45 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)

## 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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [ZOO: Zeroth Order Optimization based Black-box Attacks to Deep Neural Networks without Training Substitute Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03999/) (2017)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [Delving into Transferable Adversarial Examples and Black-box Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02770/) (2016)
- [Black-box Adversarial Attacks with Limited Queries and Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08598/) (2018)
- [Feature Squeezing: Detecting Adversarial Examples in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01155/) (2017)
- [Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks: Reliable Attacks Against Black-Box Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04248/) (2017)
- [XCiT: Cross-Covariance Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09681/) (2021)
- [Generating Adversarial Examples with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02610/) (2018)
- [Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks through Variance Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15571/) (2021)
- [A Self-supervised Approach for Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04924/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02328/) (2017)
- [Frequency Domain Model Augmentation for Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05382/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Black-box adversarial attacks remain challenging due to limited access to model internals. Existing methods often depend on specific network architectures or require numerous queries, resulting in limited cross-architecture transferability and high query costs. To address these limitations, we propose JAD, a latent diffusion model framework for black-box adversarial attacks. JAD generates adversarial examples by leveraging a latent diffusion model guided by attention maps distilled from both a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a Vision Transformer (ViT) models. By focusing on image regions that are commonly sensitive across architectures, this approach crafts adversarial perturbations that transfer effectively between different model types. This joint attention distillation strategy enables JAD to be architecture-agnostic, achieving superior attack generalization across diverse models. Moreover, the generative nature of the diffusion framework yields high adversarial sample generation efficiency by reducing reliance on iterative queries. Experiments demonstrate that JAD offers improved attack generalization, generation efficiency, and cross-architecture transferability compared to existing methods, providing a promising and effective paradigm for black-box adversarial attacks.