Research map / Adversarial robustness and security

Black-box and transfer attacks: research map

383 accepted papers on Black-box and transfer attacks in Adversarial robustness and security, from ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026), grouped into 2 clusters and 7 approaches. The busiest year so far is 2025.

Within Adversarial robustness and security, its share held steady from 11.4% in 2023–24 to 11.8% in 2025–26 (89 → 116 papers at ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR and AAAI, the venues with data for all four years).

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Approaches and key papers

query · black box · box adversarial · 240 papers

Approaches in this cluster:

Robustness benchmarks and defenses (89 papers)
Benchmark adversarial robustness and defend through architecture, denoising and loss design.
Query-efficient black-box attacks (78 papers)
Craft adversarial examples with limited queries via bandits, Bayesian optimization and priors.
Data-free substitute training (49 papers)
Attack black-box models by training substitutes without data or stealing models.
Decision-based boundary attacks (24 papers)
Attack models using only hard-label outputs by approximating decision boundaries.

Most cited and most cited since 2024:

Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses (ICLR 2018 · 2,314 citations)
Defense Against Adversarial Attacks Using High-Level Representation Guided Denoiser (CVPR 2018 · 945 citations)
DifAttack: Query-Efficient Black-Box Adversarial Attack via Disentangled Feature Space (AAAI 2024 · 22 citations)
CosPGD: an efficient white-box adversarial attack for pixel-wise prediction tasks (ICML 2024 · 13 citations)

transferable · adversarial transferability · transferability adversarial · 143 papers