Tao Li

h-index8
2papers
243citations

2 Papers

6.2CVJun 12, 2025
Defensive Adversarial CAPTCHA: A Semantics-Driven Framework for Natural Adversarial Example Generation

Xia Du, Xiaoyuan Liu, Jizhe Zhou et al.

Traditional CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) schemes are increasingly vulnerable to automated attacks powered by deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing adversarial attack methods often rely on the original image characteristics, resulting in distortions that hinder human interpretation and limit their applicability in scenarios where no initial input images are available. To address these challenges, we propose the Unsourced Adversarial CAPTCHA (DAC), a novel framework that generates high-fidelity adversarial examples guided by attacker-specified semantics information. Leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM), DAC enhances CAPTCHA diversity and enriches the semantic information. To address various application scenarios, we examine the white-box targeted attack scenario and the black box untargeted attack scenario. For target attacks, we introduce two latent noise variables that are alternately guided in the diffusion step to achieve robust inversion. The synergy between gradient guidance and latent variable optimization achieved in this way ensures that the generated adversarial examples not only accurately align with the target conditions but also achieve optimal performance in terms of distributional consistency and attack effectiveness. In untargeted attacks, especially for black-box scenarios, we introduce bi-path unsourced adversarial CAPTCHA (BP-DAC), a two-step optimization strategy employing multimodal gradients and bi-path optimization for efficient misclassification. Experiments show that the defensive adversarial CAPTCHA generated by BP-DAC is able to defend against most of the unknown models, and the generated CAPTCHA is indistinguishable to both humans and DNNs.

13.5CVMar 8, 2021
Differentially Private Imaging via Latent Space Manipulation

Tao Li, Chris Clifton

There is growing concern about image privacy due to the popularity of social media and photo devices, along with increasing use of face recognition systems. However, established image de-identification techniques are either too subject to re-identification, produce photos that are insufficiently realistic, or both. To tackle this, we present a novel approach for image obfuscation by manipulating latent spaces of an unconditionally trained generative model that is able to synthesize photo-realistic facial images of high resolution. This manipulation is done in a way that satisfies the formal privacy standard of local differential privacy. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to image privacy that satisfies $\varepsilon$-differential privacy \emph{for the person.}