AdvDreamer Unveils: Are Vision-Language Models Truly Ready for Real-World 3D Variations?

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities, yet their robustness in dynamic real-world scenarios remains largely unexplored. To systematically evaluate VLMs' robustness to real-world 3D variations, we propose AdvDreamer, the first framework that generates physically reproducible adversarial 3D transformation (Adv-3DT) samples from single-view images. AdvDreamer integrates advanced generative techniques with two key innovations and aims to characterize the worst-case distributions of 3D variations from natural images. To ensure adversarial effectiveness and method generality, we introduce an Inverse Semantic Probability Objective that executes adversarial optimization on fundamental vision-text alignment spaces, which can be generalizable across different VLM architectures and downstream tasks. To mitigate the distribution discrepancy between generated and real-world samples while maintaining physical reproducibility, we design a Naturalness Reward Model that provides regularization feedback during adversarial optimization, preventing convergence towards hallucinated and unnatural elements. Leveraging AdvDreamer, we establish MM3DTBench, the first VQA dataset for benchmarking VLMs' 3D variations robustness. Extensive evaluations on representative VLMs with diverse architectures highlight that 3D variations in the real world may pose severe threats to model performance across various tasks.

OODFace: Benchmarking Robustness of Face Recognition under Common Corruptions and Appearance Variations

With the rise of deep learning, facial recognition technology has seen extensive research and rapid development. Although facial recognition is considered a mature technology, we find that existing open-source models and commercial algorithms lack robustness in certain real-world Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios, raising concerns about the reliability of these systems. In this paper, we introduce OODFace, which explores the OOD challenges faced by facial recognition models from two perspectives: common corruptions and appearance variations. We systematically design 30 OOD scenarios across 9 major categories tailored for facial recognition. By simulating these challenges on public datasets, we establish three robustness benchmarks: LFW-C/V, CFP-FP-C/V, and YTF-C/V. We then conduct extensive experiments on 19 different facial recognition models and 3 commercial APIs, along with extended experiments on face masks, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and defense strategies to assess their robustness. Based on the results, we draw several key insights, highlighting the vulnerability of facial recognition systems to OOD data and suggesting possible solutions. Additionally, we offer a unified toolkit that includes all corruption and variation types, easily extendable to other datasets. We hope that our benchmarks and findings can provide guidance for future improvements in facial recognition model robustness.

Real-world Adversarial Defense against Patch Attacks based on Diffusion Model

Adversarial patches present significant challenges to the robustness of deep learning models, making the development of effective defenses become critical for real-world applications. This paper introduces DIFFender, a novel DIFfusion-based DeFender framework that leverages the power of a text-guided diffusion model to counter adversarial patch attacks. At the core of our approach is the discovery of the Adversarial Anomaly Perception (AAP) phenomenon, which enables the diffusion model to accurately detect and locate adversarial patches by analyzing distributional anomalies. DIFFender seamlessly integrates the tasks of patch localization and restoration within a unified diffusion model framework, enhancing defense efficacy through their close interaction. Additionally, DIFFender employs an efficient few-shot prompt-tuning algorithm, facilitating the adaptation of the pre-trained diffusion model to defense tasks without the need for extensive retraining. Our comprehensive evaluation, covering image classification and face recognition tasks, as well as real-world scenarios, demonstrates DIFFender's robust performance against adversarial attacks. The framework's versatility and generalizability across various settings, classifiers, and attack methodologies mark a significant advancement in adversarial patch defense strategies. Except for the popular visible domain, we have identified another advantage of DIFFender: its capability to easily expand into the infrared domain. Consequently, we demonstrate the good flexibility of DIFFender, which can defend against both infrared and visible adversarial patch attacks alternatively using a universal defense framework.

Omniview-Tuning: Boosting Viewpoint Invariance of Vision-Language Pre-training Models

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models like CLIP have achieved remarkable success in computer vision and particularly demonstrated superior robustness to distribution shifts of 2D images. However, their robustness under 3D viewpoint variations is still limited, which can hinder the development for real-world applications. This paper successfully addresses this concern while keeping VLPs' original performance by breaking through two primary obstacles: 1) the scarcity of training data and 2) the suboptimal fine-tuning paradigms. To combat data scarcity, we build the Multi-View Caption (MVCap) dataset -- a comprehensive collection of over four million multi-view image-text pairs across more than 100K objects, providing more potential for VLP models to develop generalizable viewpoint-invariant representations. To address the limitations of existing paradigms in performance trade-offs and training efficiency, we design a novel fine-tuning framework named Omniview-Tuning (OVT). Specifically, OVT introduces a Cross-Viewpoint Alignment objective through a minimax-like optimization strategy, which effectively aligns representations of identical objects from diverse viewpoints without causing overfitting. Additionally, OVT fine-tunes VLP models in a parameter-efficient manner, leading to minimal computational cost. Extensive experiments on various VLP models with different architectures validate that OVT significantly improves the models' resilience to viewpoint shifts and keeps the original performance, establishing a pioneering standard for boosting the viewpoint invariance of VLP models.

Towards Transferable Targeted 3D Adversarial Attack in the Physical World

Compared with transferable untargeted attacks, transferable targeted adversarial attacks could specify the misclassification categories of adversarial samples, posing a greater threat to security-critical tasks. In the meanwhile, 3D adversarial samples, due to their potential of multi-view robustness, can more comprehensively identify weaknesses in existing deep learning systems, possessing great application value. However, the field of transferable targeted 3D adversarial attacks remains vacant. The goal of this work is to develop a more effective technique that could generate transferable targeted 3D adversarial examples, filling the gap in this field. To achieve this goal, we design a novel framework named TT3D that could rapidly reconstruct from few multi-view images into Transferable Targeted 3D textured meshes. While existing mesh-based texture optimization methods compute gradients in the high-dimensional mesh space and easily fall into local optima, leading to unsatisfactory transferability and distinct distortions, TT3D innovatively performs dual optimization towards both feature grid and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) parameters in the grid-based NeRF space, which significantly enhances black-box transferability while enjoying naturalness. Experimental results show that TT3D not only exhibits superior cross-model transferability but also maintains considerable adaptability across different renders and vision tasks. More importantly, we produce 3D adversarial examples with 3D printing techniques in the real world and verify their robust performance under various scenarios.

Improving Viewpoint Robustness for Visual Recognition via Adversarial Training

Viewpoint invariance remains challenging for visual recognition in the 3D world, as altering the viewing directions can significantly impact predictions for the same object. While substantial efforts have been dedicated to making neural networks invariant to 2D image translations and rotations, viewpoint invariance is rarely investigated. Motivated by the success of adversarial training in enhancing model robustness, we propose Viewpoint-Invariant Adversarial Training (VIAT) to improve the viewpoint robustness of image classifiers. Regarding viewpoint transformation as an attack, we formulate VIAT as a minimax optimization problem, where the inner maximization characterizes diverse adversarial viewpoints by learning a Gaussian mixture distribution based on the proposed attack method GMVFool. The outer minimization obtains a viewpoint-invariant classifier by minimizing the expected loss over the worst-case viewpoint distributions that can share the same one for different objects within the same category. Based on GMVFool, we contribute a large-scale dataset called ImageNet-V+ to benchmark viewpoint robustness. Experimental results show that VIAT significantly improves the viewpoint robustness of various image classifiers based on the diversity of adversarial viewpoints generated by GMVFool. Furthermore, we propose ViewRS, a certified viewpoint robustness method that provides a certified radius and accuracy to demonstrate the effectiveness of VIAT from the theoretical perspective.

Towards Viewpoint-Invariant Visual Recognition via Adversarial Training

Visual recognition models are not invariant to viewpoint changes in the 3D world, as different viewing directions can dramatically affect the predictions given the same object. Although many efforts have been devoted to making neural networks invariant to 2D image translations and rotations, viewpoint invariance is rarely investigated. As most models process images in the perspective view, it is challenging to impose invariance to 3D viewpoint changes based only on 2D inputs. Motivated by the success of adversarial training in promoting model robustness, we propose Viewpoint-Invariant Adversarial Training (VIAT) to improve viewpoint robustness of common image classifiers. By regarding viewpoint transformation as an attack, VIAT is formulated as a minimax optimization problem, where the inner maximization characterizes diverse adversarial viewpoints by learning a Gaussian mixture distribution based on a new attack GMVFool, while the outer minimization trains a viewpoint-invariant classifier by minimizing the expected loss over the worst-case adversarial viewpoint distributions. To further improve the generalization performance, a distribution sharing strategy is introduced leveraging the transferability of adversarial viewpoints across objects. Experiments validate the effectiveness of VIAT in improving the viewpoint robustness of various image classifiers based on the diversity of adversarial viewpoints generated by GMVFool.

Distributional Modeling for Location-Aware Adversarial Patches

Adversarial patch is one of the important forms of performing adversarial attacks in the physical world. To improve the naturalness and aggressiveness of existing adversarial patches, location-aware patches are proposed, where the patch's location on the target object is integrated into the optimization process to perform attacks. Although it is effective, efficiently finding the optimal location for placing the patches is challenging, especially under the black-box attack settings. In this paper, we propose the Distribution-Optimized Adversarial Patch (DOPatch), a novel method that optimizes a multimodal distribution of adversarial locations instead of individual ones. DOPatch has several benefits: Firstly, we find that the locations' distributions across different models are pretty similar, and thus we can achieve efficient query-based attacks to unseen models using a distributional prior optimized on a surrogate model. Secondly, DOPatch can generate diverse adversarial samples by characterizing the distribution of adversarial locations. Thus we can improve the model's robustness to location-aware patches via carefully designed Distributional-Modeling Adversarial Training (DOP-DMAT). We evaluate DOPatch on various face recognition and image recognition tasks and demonstrate its superiority and efficiency over existing methods. We also conduct extensive ablation studies and analyses to validate the effectiveness of our method and provide insights into the distribution of adversarial locations.

DIFFender: Diffusion-Based Adversarial Defense against Patch Attacks in the Physical World

Adversarial attacks in the physical world, particularly patch attacks, pose significant threats to the robustness and reliability of deep learning models. Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks is crucial for real-world applications, yet current research in this area is severely lacking. In this paper, we propose DIFFender, a novel defense method that leverages the pre-trained diffusion model to perform both localization and defense against potential adversarial patch attacks. DIFFender is designed as a pipeline consisting of two main stages: patch localization and restoration. In the localization stage, we exploit the intriguing properties of a diffusion model to effectively identify the locations of adversarial patches. In the restoration stage, we employ a text-guided diffusion model to eliminate adversarial regions in the image while preserving the integrity of the visual content. Additionally, we design a few-shot prompt-tuning algorithm to facilitate simple and efficient tuning, enabling the learned representations to easily transfer to downstream tasks, which optimize two stages jointly. We conduct extensive experiments on image classification and face recognition to demonstrate that DIFFender exhibits superior robustness under strong adaptive attacks and generalizes well across various scenarios, diverse classifiers, and multiple attack methods.

ViewFool: Evaluating the Robustness of Visual Recognition to Adversarial Viewpoints

Recent studies have demonstrated that visual recognition models lack robustness to distribution shift. However, current work mainly considers model robustness to 2D image transformations, leaving viewpoint changes in the 3D world less explored. In general, viewpoint changes are prevalent in various real-world applications (e.g., autonomous driving), making it imperative to evaluate viewpoint robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel method called ViewFool to find adversarial viewpoints that mislead visual recognition models. By encoding real-world objects as neural radiance fields (NeRF), ViewFool characterizes a distribution of diverse adversarial viewpoints under an entropic regularizer, which helps to handle the fluctuations of the real camera pose and mitigate the reality gap between the real objects and their neural representations. Experiments validate that the common image classifiers are extremely vulnerable to the generated adversarial viewpoints, which also exhibit high cross-model transferability. Based on ViewFool, we introduce ImageNet-V, a new out-of-distribution dataset for benchmarking viewpoint robustness of image classifiers. Evaluation results on 40 classifiers with diverse architectures, objective functions, and data augmentations reveal a significant drop in model performance when tested on ImageNet-V, which provides a possibility to leverage ViewFool as an effective data augmentation strategy to improve viewpoint robustness.