attack 2026

Towards Robust Universal Perturbation Attacks: A Float-Coded, Penalty-Driven Evolutionary Approach

Shiqi Wang 1, Mahdi Khosravy 2, Neeraj Gupta 3, Olaf Witkowski 2

0 citations · 28 references · arXiv

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Published on arXiv

2601.12624

Input Manipulation Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01

Key Finding

The proposed evolutionary framework consistently produces UAPs with smaller norms, higher misclassification rates, and faster convergence than existing evolutionary-based UAP methods on ImageNet across diverse architectures.


Universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) have garnered significant attention due to their ability to undermine deep neural networks across multiple inputs using a single noise pattern. Evolutionary algorithms offer a promising approach to generating such perturbations due to their ability to navigate non-convex, gradient-free landscapes. In this work, we introduce a float-coded, penalty-driven single-objective evolutionary framework for UAP generation that achieves lower visibility perturbations while enhancing attack success rates. Our approach leverages continuous gene representations aligned with contemporary deep learning scales, incorporates dynamic evolutionary operators with adaptive scheduling, and utilizes a modular PyTorch implementation for seamless integration with modern architectures. Additionally, we ensure the universality of the generated perturbations by testing across diverse models and by periodically switching batches to prevent overfitting. Experimental results on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our framework consistently produces perturbations with smaller norms, higher misclassification effectiveness, and faster convergence compared to existing evolutionary-based methods. These findings highlight the robustness and scalability of our approach for universal adversarial attacks across various deep learning architectures.


Key Contributions

  • Float-coded, penalty-driven single-objective evolutionary framework for universal adversarial perturbation generation without gradient information
  • Dynamic evolutionary operators with adaptive scheduling and periodic batch switching to prevent overfitting and improve universality
  • Demonstrates smaller-norm perturbations with higher attack success rates and faster convergence than existing evolutionary UAP methods on ImageNet

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Input Manipulation Attack

Proposes a method to craft universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) — a single noise pattern that causes misclassification across many inputs at inference time. This is a textbook input manipulation / adversarial example attack, using evolutionary algorithms instead of gradient descent.


Details

Domains
vision
Model Types
cnntransformer
Threat Tags
black_boxuntargeteddigitalinference_time
Datasets
ImageNet
Applications
image classification