Dual-Flow: Transferable Multi-Target, Instance-Agnostic Attacks via In-the-wild Cascading Flow Optimization

Adversarial attacks are widely used to evaluate model robustness, and in black-box scenarios, the transferability of these attacks becomes crucial. Existing generator-based attacks have excellent generalization and transferability due to their instance-agnostic nature. However, when training generators for multi-target tasks, the success rate of transfer attacks is relatively low due to the limitations of the model's capacity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual-Flow framework for multi-target instance-agnostic adversarial attacks, utilizing Cascading Distribution Shift Training to develop an adversarial velocity function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dual-Flow significantly improves transferability over previous multi-target generative attacks. For example, it increases the success rate from Inception-v3 to ResNet-152 by 34.58%. Furthermore, our attack method shows substantially stronger robustness against defense mechanisms, such as adversarially trained models.

@article{chen2025_2502.02096,
  title={ Dual-Flow: Transferable Multi-Target, Instance-Agnostic Attacks via In-the-wild Cascading Flow Optimization },
  author={ Yixiao Chen and Shikun Sun and Jianshu Li and Ruoyu Li and Zhe Li and Junliang Xing },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02096},
  year={ 2025 }
}