defense 2026

APC: Transferable and Efficient Adversarial Point Counterattack for Robust 3D Point Cloud Recognition

Geunyoung Jung , Soohong Kim , Inseok Kong , Jiyoung Jung

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Published on arXiv

2604.15708

Input Manipulation Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01

Key Finding

Achieves state-of-the-art defense performance on 3D point cloud benchmarks with superior cross-model transferability and negligible inference overhead

APC

Novel technique introduced


The advent of deep neural networks has led to remarkable progress in 3D point cloud recognition, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although various defense methods have been studied, they suffer from a trade-off between robustness and transferability. We propose Adversarial Point Counterattack (APC) to achieve both simultaneously. APC is a lightweight input-level purification module that generates instance-specific counter-perturbations for each point, effectively neutralizing attacks. Leveraging clean-adversarial pairs, APC enforces geometric consistency in data space and semantic consistency in feature space. To improve generalizability across diverse attacks, we adopt a hybrid training strategy using adversarial point clouds from multiple attack types. Since APC operates purely on input point clouds, it directly transfers to unseen models and defends against attacks targeting them without retraining. At inference, a single APC forward pass provides purified point clouds with negligible time and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments on two 3D recognition benchmarks demonstrate that the APC achieves state-of-the-art defense performance. Furthermore, cross-model evaluations validate its superior transferability. The code is available at https://github.com/gyjung975/APC.


Key Contributions

  • Lightweight input-level purification module that generates instance-specific counter-perturbations for adversarial point clouds
  • Hybrid training strategy using multiple attack types to improve generalizability across diverse adversarial attacks
  • Transferable defense that works on unseen models without retraining, with negligible computational overhead

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Input Manipulation Attack

Defense against adversarial perturbations targeting 3D point cloud classifiers at inference time. APC generates counter-perturbations to purify adversarially perturbed inputs, directly addressing input manipulation attacks.


Details

Domains
vision
Model Types
cnntransformer
Threat Tags
inference_timedigital
Datasets
ModelNet40ScanObjectNN
Applications
3d point cloud recognitionobject classification