APC: Transferable and Efficient Adversarial Point Counterattack for Robust 3D Point Cloud Recognition
Geunyoung Jung , Soohong Kim , Inseok Kong , Jiyoung Jung
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
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.