Manipulating the Mind’s Eye: A-SAGE, the Attention-Based Attack on ViT Explainability

Boshi Zheng; Yan Li; Jiabin Liu

AAAI 2026technical0 citations

Manipulating the Mind’s Eye: A-SAGE, the Attention-Based Attack on ViT Explainability

Abstract

The rise of Vision Transformers (ViTs) as cornerstone models in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving and medical diagnosis has shifted the focus from pure accuracy to verifiable trustworthiness. However, the very mechanisms used to explain these models, their internal attention maps, are themselves vulnerable. This creates a critical "trust gap," as the model

BibTeX

@inproceedings{aaai2026_manipulatingthem,
  title = {Manipulating the Mind’s Eye: A-SAGE, the Attention-Based Attack on ViT Explainability},
  author = {Boshi Zheng and Yan Li and Jiabin Liu},
  booktitle = {AAAI 2026},
  year = {2026}
}