Generating Adversarial Events: A Motion-Aware Point Cloud Framework
Hongwei Ren , Youxin Jiang , Qifei Gu , Xiangqian Wu
Published on arXiv
2602.08230
Input Manipulation Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01
Key Finding
Achieves 100% attack success rate with minimal perturbation cost on event-based classification models, with demonstrated robustness against defenses
MA-ADV
Novel technique introduced
Event cameras have been widely adopted in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving, robotics, and human-computer interaction. A pressing challenge arises from the vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples, which poses a significant threat to the reliability of event-based systems. Nevertheless, research into adversarial attacks on events is scarce. This is primarily due to the non-differentiable nature of mainstream event representations, which hinders the extension of gradient-based attack methods. In this paper, we propose MA-ADV, a novel \textbf{M}otion-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{Adv}ersarial framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to generate adversarial events by leveraging point cloud representations. MA-ADV accounts for high-frequency noise in events and employs a diffusion-based approach to smooth perturbations, while fully leveraging the spatial and temporal relationships among events. Finally, MA-ADV identifies the minimal-cost perturbation through a combination of sample-wise Adam optimization, iterative refinement, and binary search. Extensive experimental results validate that MA-ADV ensures a 100\% attack success rate with minimal perturbation cost, and also demonstrate enhanced robustness against defenses, underscoring the critical security challenges facing future event-based perception systems.
Key Contributions
- First gradient-based adversarial attack framework for event cameras by bridging through point cloud representations, bypassing the non-differentiability of standard event representations
- Perturbation diffusion strategy using weighted spatio-temporal neighborhood information to smooth high-frequency noise and stabilize gradient optimization
- Sample-wise Adam learning rate adjustment with iterative refinement and binary search to identify minimal-cost adversarial perturbations
🛡️ Threat Analysis
MA-ADV crafts adversarial perturbations on event-camera inputs at inference time to cause misclassification, using gradient-based optimization (Adam, iterative refinement, binary search) — classic adversarial example attack extended to a new non-differentiable input modality.