CVOct 1, 2025

ZQBA: Zero Query Black-box Adversarial Attack

arXiv:2510.00769v11 citationsh-index: 5Has Code
Originality Highly original
AI Analysis

This addresses vulnerabilities in deploying DNNs in real-world settings by enabling efficient adversarial attacks without multiple queries or complex training.

The paper tackles the problem of black-box adversarial attacks by proposing a zero-query method that uses feature maps from a DNN to fool target models, achieving higher effectiveness than state-of-the-art attacks with a single query while maintaining imperceptible perturbations.

Current black-box adversarial attacks either require multiple queries or diffusion models to produce adversarial samples that can impair the target model performance. However, these methods require training a surrogate loss or diffusion models to produce adversarial samples, which limits their applicability in real-world settings. Thus, we propose a Zero Query Black-box Adversarial (ZQBA) attack that exploits the representations of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to fool other networks. Instead of requiring thousands of queries to produce deceiving adversarial samples, we use the feature maps obtained from a DNN and add them to clean images to impair the classification of a target model. The results suggest that ZQBA can transfer the adversarial samples to different models and across various datasets, namely CIFAR and Tiny ImageNet. The experiments also show that ZQBA is more effective than state-of-the-art black-box attacks with a single query, while maintaining the imperceptibility of perturbations, evaluated both quantitatively (SSIM) and qualitatively, emphasizing the vulnerabilities of employing DNNs in real-world contexts. All the source code is available at https://github.com/Joana-Cabral/ZQBA.

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