GenSeg: On Generating Unified Adversary for Segmentation

Abstract

Great advancements in semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation have been made in recent years, yet the top-performing models remain vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial perturbation. Current attacks on segmentation primarily focus on a single task, and these methods typically rely on iterative instance-specific strategies, resulting in limited attack transferability and low efficiency. In this paper, we propose GenSeg, a Generative paradigm that creates unified adversaries for Segmentation tasks. In particular, we propose an intermediate-level objective to enhance attack transferability, including a mutual agreement loss for feature deviation, and a prototype obfuscating loss to disrupt intra-class and inter-class relationships. Moreover, GenSeg crafts an adversary in a single forward pass, significantly boosting the attack efficiency. Besides, we unify multiple segmentation tasks to GenSeg in a novel category-and-mask view, which makes it possible to attack these segmentation tasks within this unified framework, and conduct cross-domain and cross-task attacks as well. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GenSeg in black-box attacks compared with state-of-the-art attacks. To our best knowledge, GenSeg is the first approach capable of conducting cross-domain and cross-task attacks on segmentation tasks, which are closer to real-world scenarios.