Abstract
A key bottleneck in adversarial transfer is a trajectory-level geometric disconnect: ambient gradients often drift away from the intrinsic data manifold, causing surrogate-specific overfitting. To rectify this, we propose Manifold Anchored Bilevel Transfer (MABT), a unified framework that anchors adversarial trajectories to the shared semantic subspace. MABT introduces a relaxed manifold-anchoring operator as a semantic rectifier to suppress off-manifold noise. With this constraint, we cast transfer attack generation as a distributional bilevel optimization problem that learns a geometry-aligned initialization by minimizing expected transfer risk under a surrogate uncertainty distribution. We further develop a Hessian-free solver with linear-time complexity to handle the resulting hierarchy. Experiments demonstrate improved transferability for 10 baseline attackers across 28 attack configurations, diverse victim architectures, and defense mechanisms.
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Publication details
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Cite this article
APA 7
Liu, Y., Guo, Y., & Gao, J. (2026). Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/anchoring-adversarial-trajectories-to-data-manifolds-a-bilevel-transfer-optimization-framework
MLA 9
Liu, Yaohua, et al. "Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/anchoring-adversarial-trajectories-to-data-manifolds-a-bilevel-transfer-optimization-framework.
Chicago (author–date)
Liu, Yaohua, Yifan Guo, and Jiaxin Gao. 2026. "Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/anchoring-adversarial-trajectories-to-data-manifolds-a-bilevel-transfer-optimization-framework.
Harvard
Liu, Y., Guo, Y. and Gao, J. (2026) 'Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/anchoring-adversarial-trajectories-to-data-manifolds-a-bilevel-transfer-optimization-framework.
Vancouver
Liu Y, Guo Y, Gao J. Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/anchoring-adversarial-trajectories-to-data-manifolds-a-bilevel-transfer-optimization-framework
IEEE
Y. Liu, Y. Guo, and J. Gao, "Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/anchoring-adversarial-trajectories-to-data-manifolds-a-bilevel-transfer-optimization-framework.