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Minghui Li

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11 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Dual-View Inference Attack: Machine Unlearning Amplifies Privacy Exposure

Lulu Xue
Shengshan Hu
Linqiang Qian
Peijin Guo
Yechao Zhang
Minghui Li
Yanjun Zhang
Dayong Ye

Machine unlearning is a newly popularized technique for removing specific training data from a trained model, enabling it to comply with data deletion requests. While it protects the rights of users requesting unlearning, it also introduces new privacy risks. Prior works have primarily focused on the privacy of data that has been unlearned, while the risks to retained data remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the privacy risks of retained data and, for the first time, reveal the vulnerabilities introduced by machine unlearning under the dual-view setting, where an adversary can query both the original and the unlearned models. From an information-theoretic perspective, we introduce the concept of privacy knowledge gain and demonstrate that the dual-view setting allows adversaries to obtain more information than querying either model alone, thereby amplifying privacy leakage. To effectively demonstrate this threat, we propose DVIA, a Dual-View Inference Attack, which extracts membership information on retained data using black-box queries to both models. DVIA eliminates the need to train an attack model and employs a lightweight likelihood ratio inference module for efficient inference. Experiments across different datasets and model architectures validate the effectiveness of DVIA and highlight the privacy risks inherent in the dual-view setting.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AdvEDM: Fine-grained Adversarial Attack against VLM-based Embodied Agents

Yichen Wang
Hangtao Zhang
Hewen Pan
Ziqi Zhou
Xianlong Wang
Peijin Guo
Lulu Xue
Shengshan Hu

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with their strong reasoning and planning capabilities, are widely used in embodied decision-making (EDM) tasks in embodied agents, such as autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. Recent research has increasingly explored adversarial attacks on VLMs to reveal their vulnerabilities. However, these attacks either rely on overly strong assumptions, requiring full knowledge of the victim VLM, which is impractical for attacking VLM-based agents, or exhibit limited effectiveness. The latter stems from disrupting most semantic information in the image, which leads to a misalignment between the perception and the task context defined by system prompts. This inconsistency interrupts the VLM's reasoning process, resulting in invalid outputs that fail to affect interactions in the physical world. To this end, we propose a fine-grained adversarial attack framework, AdvEDM, which modifies the VLM's perception of only a few key objects while preserving the semantics of the remaining regions. This attack effectively reduces conflicts with the task context, making VLMs output valid but incorrect decisions and affecting the actions of agents, thus posing a more substantial safety threat in the physical world. We design two variants of based on this framework, AdvEDM-R and AdvEDM-A, which respectively remove the semantics of a specific object from the image and add the semantics of a new object into the image. The experimental results in both general scenarios and EDM tasks demonstrate fine-grained control and excellent attack performance.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

BadRobot: Jailbreaking Embodied LLM Agents in the Physical World

Hangtao Zhang
Chenyu Zhu
Xianlong Wang 0001
Ziqi Zhou 0001
Changgan Yin
Minghui Li
Lulu Xue
Yichen Wang

Embodied AI represents systems where AI is integrated into physical entities. Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM), which exhibits powerful language understanding abilities, has been extensively employed in embodied AI by facilitating sophisticated task planning. However, a critical safety issue remains overlooked: could these embodied LLMs perpetrate harmful behaviors? In response, we introduce BadRobot, the first attack paradigm designed to jailbreak robotic manipulation, making embodied LLMs violate safety and ethical constraints through typical voice-based user-system interactions. Specifically, three vulnerabilities are exploited to achieve this type of attack: (i) manipulation of LLMs within robotic systems, (ii) misalignment between linguistic outputs and physical actions, and (iii) unintentional hazardous behaviors caused by world knowledge's flaws. Furthermore, we construct a benchmark of various malicious physical action queries to evaluate BadRobot's attack performance. Based on this benchmark, extensive experiments against existing prominent embodied LLM frameworks (e.g., Voxposer, Code as Policies, and ProgPrompt) demonstrate the effectiveness of our BadRobot. We emphasize that addressing this emerging vulnerability is crucial for the secure deployment of LLMs in robotics. Warning: This paper contains harmful AI-generated language and aggressive actions.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Breaking Barriers in Physical-World Adversarial Examples: Improving Robustness and Transferability via Robust Feature

Yichen Wang
Yuxuan Chou
Ziqi Zhou
Hangtao Zhang
Wei Wan
Shengshan Hu
Minghui Li

As deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely applied in the physical world, many researches are focusing on physical-world adversarial examples (PAEs), which introduce perturbations to inputs and cause the model's incorrect outputs. However, existing PAEs face two challenges: unsatisfactory attack performance (i.e., poor transferability and insufficient robustness to environment conditions), and difficulty in balancing attack effectiveness with stealthiness, where better attack effectiveness often makes PAEs more perceptible. In this paper, we explore a novel perturbation-based method to overcome the challenges. For the first challenge, we introduce a strategy Deceptive RF injection based on robust features (RFs) that are predictive, robust to perturbations, and consistent across different models. Specifically, it improves the transferability and robustness of PAEs by covering RFs of other classes onto the predictive features in clean images. For the second challenge, we introduce another strategy Adversarial Semantic Pattern Minimization, which removes most perturbations and retains only essential adversarial patterns in AEs. Based on the two strategies, we design our method Robust Feature Coverage Attack (RFCoA), comprising Robust Feature Disentanglement and Adversarial Feature Fusion. In the first stage, we extract target class RFs in feature space. In the second stage, we use attention-based feature fusion to overlay these RFs onto predictive features of clean images and remove unnecessary perturbations. Experiments show our method's superior transferability, robustness, and stealthiness compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our method's effectiveness can extend to Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), indicating its potential applicability to more complex tasks.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Detecting and Corrupting Convolution-based Unlearnable Examples

Minghui Li
Xianlong Wang
Zhifei Yu
Shengshan Hu
Ziqi Zhou
Longling Zhang
Leo Yu Zhang

Convolution-based unlearnable examples (UEs) employ class-wise multiplicative convolutional noise to training samples, severely compromising model performance. This fire-new type of UEs have successfully countered all defense mechanisms against UEs. The failure of such defenses can be attributed to the absence of norm constraints on convolutional noise, leading to severe blurring of image features. To address this, we first design an Edge Pixel-based Detector (EPD) to identify convolution-based UEs. Upon detection of them, we propose the first defense scheme against convolution-based UEs, COrrupting these samples via random matrix multiplication by employing bilinear INterpolation (COIN) such that disrupting the distribution of class-wise multiplicative noise. To evaluate the generalization of our proposed COIN, we newly design two convolution-based UEs called VUDA and HUDA to expand the scope of convolution-based UEs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of detection scheme EPD and that our defense COIN outperforms 11 state-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses, achieving a significant improvement on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Improving Generalization of Universal Adversarial Perturbation via Dynamic Maximin Optimization

Yechao Zhang
Yingzhe Xu
Junyu Shi
Leo Yu Zhang
Shengshan Hu
Minghui Li
Yanjun Zhang

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs). These perturbations are meticulously designed to fool the target model universally across all sample classes. Unlike instance-specific adversarial examples (AEs), generating UAPs is more complex because they must be generalized across a wide range of data samples and models. Our research reveals that existing universal attack methods, which optimize UAPs using DNNs with static model parameter snapshots, do not fully leverage the potential of DNNs to generate more effective UAPs. Rather than optimizing UAPs against static DNN models with a fixed training set, we suggest using dynamic model-data pairs to generate UAPs. In particular, we introduce a dynamic maximin optimization strategy, aiming to optimize the UAP across a variety of optimal model-data pairs. We term this approach DM-UAP. DM-UAP utilizes an iterative max-min-min optimization framework that refines the model-data pairs, coupled with a curriculum UAP learning algorithm to examine the combined space of model parameters and data thoroughly. Comprehensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that the proposed DM-UAP markedly enhances both cross-sample universality and cross-model transferability of UAPs. Using only 500 samples for UAP generation, DM-UAP outperforms the state-of-the-art approach with an average increase in fooling ratio of 12.108%.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

DarkFed: A Data-Free Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning

Minghui Li
Wei Wan
Yuxuan Ning
Shengshan Hu
Lulu Xue
Leo Yu Zhang
Yichen Wang

Federated learning (FL) has been demonstrated to be susceptible to backdoor attacks. However, existing academic studies on FL backdoor attacks rely on a high proportion of real clients with main task-related data, which is impractical. In the context of real-world industrial scenarios, even the simplest defense suffices to defend against the state-of-the-art attack, 3DFed. A practical FL backdoor attack remains in a nascent stage of development. To bridge this gap, we present DarkFed. Initially, we emulate a series of fake clients, thereby achieving the attacker proportion typical of academic research scenarios. Given that these emulated fake clients lack genuine training data, we further propose a data-free approach to backdoor FL. Specifically, we delve into the feasibility of injecting a backdoor using a shadow dataset. Our exploration reveals that impressive attack performance can be achieved, even when there is a substantial gap between the shadow dataset and the main task dataset. This holds true even when employing synthetic data devoid of any semantic information as the shadow dataset. Subsequently, we strategically construct a series of covert backdoor updates in an optimized manner, mimicking the properties of benign updates, to evade detection by defenses. A substantial body of empirical evidence validates the tangible effectiveness of DarkFed.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

DarkSAM: Fooling Segment Anything Model to Segment Nothing

Ziqi Zhou
Yufei Song
Minghui Li
Shengshan Hu
Xianlong Wang
Leo Yu Zhang
Dezhong Yao
Hai Jin

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has recently gained much attention for its outstanding generalization to unseen data and tasks. Despite its promising prospect, the vulnerabilities of SAM, especially to universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) have not been thoroughly investigated yet. In this paper, we propose DarkSAM, the first prompt-free universal attack framework against SAM, including a semantic decoupling-based spatial attack and a texture distortion-based frequency attack. We first divide the output of SAM into foreground and background. Then, we design a shadow target strategy to obtain the semantic blueprint of the image as the attack target. DarkSAM is dedicated to fooling SAM by extracting and destroying crucial object features from images in both spatial and frequency domains. In the spatial domain, we disrupt the semantics of both the foreground and background in the image to confuse SAM. In the frequency domain, we further enhance the attack effectiveness by distorting the high-frequency components (i. e. , texture information) of the image. Consequently, with a single UAP, DarkSAM renders SAM incapable of segmenting objects across diverse images with varying prompts. Experimental results on four datasets for SAM and its two variant models demonstrate the powerful attack capability and transferability of DarkSAM. Our codes are available at: https: //github. com/CGCL-codes/DarkSAM.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Unlearnable 3D Point Clouds: Class-wise Transformation Is All You Need

Xianlong Wang
Minghui Li
Wei Liu
Hangtao Zhang
Shengshan Hu
Yechao Zhang
Ziqi Zhou
Hai Jin

Traditional unlearnable strategies have been proposed to prevent unauthorized users from training on the 2D image data. With more 3D point cloud data containing sensitivity information, unauthorized usage of this new type data has also become a serious concern. To address this, we propose the first integral unlearnable framework for 3D point clouds including two processes: (i) we propose an unlearnable data protection scheme, involving a class-wise setting established by a category-adaptive allocation strategy and multi-transformations assigned to samples; (ii) we propose a data restoration scheme that utilizes class-wise inverse matrix transformation, thus enabling authorized-only training for unlearnable data. This restoration process is a practical issue overlooked in most existing unlearnable literature, i. e. , even authorized users struggle to gain knowledge from 3D unlearnable data. Both theoretical and empirical results (including 6 datasets, 16 models, and 2 tasks) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed unlearnable framework. Our code is available at https: //github. com/CGCL-codes/UnlearnablePC.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

PointCA: Evaluating the Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Completion Models against Adversarial Examples

Shengshan Hu
Junwei Zhang
Wei Liu
Junhui Hou
Minghui Li
Leo Yu Zhang
Hai Jin
Lichao Sun

Point cloud completion, as the upstream procedure of 3D recognition and segmentation, has become an essential part of many tasks such as navigation and scene understanding. While various point cloud completion models have demonstrated their powerful capabilities, their robustness against adversarial attacks, which have been proven to be fatally malicious towards deep neural networks, remains unknown. In addition, existing attack approaches towards point cloud classifiers cannot be applied to the completion models due to different output forms and attack purposes. In order to evaluate the robustness of the completion models, we propose PointCA, the first adversarial attack against 3D point cloud completion models. PointCA can generate adversarial point clouds that maintain high similarity with the original ones, while being completed as another object with totally different semantic information. Specifically, we minimize the representation discrepancy between the adversarial example and the target point set to jointly explore the adversarial point clouds in the geometry space and the feature space. Furthermore, to launch a stealthier attack, we innovatively employ the neighbourhood density information to tailor the perturbation constraint, leading to geometry-aware and distribution-adaptive modifications for each point. Extensive experiments against different premier point cloud completion networks show that PointCA can cause the performance degradation from 77.9% to 16.7%, with the structure chamfer distance kept below 0.01. We conclude that existing completion models are severely vulnerable to adversarial examples, and state-of-the-art defenses for point cloud classification will be partially invalid when applied to incomplete and uneven point cloud data.

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AAAI Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Partially Supervised Text Classification with Multi-Level Examples

Tao Liu
Xiaoyong Du
Yongdong Xu
Minghui Li
Xiaolong Wang

Partially supervised text classification has received great research attention since it only uses positive and unlabeled examples as training data. This problem can be solved by automatically labeling some negative (and more positive) examples from unlabeled examples before training a text classifier. But it is difficult to guarantee both high quality and quantity of the new labeled examples. In this paper, a multi-level example based learning method for partially supervised text classification is proposed, which can make full use of all unlabeled examples. A heuristic method is proposed to assign possible labels to unlabeled examples and partition them into multiple levels according to their labeling confidence. A text classifier is trained on these multi-level examples using weighted support vector machines. Experiments show that the multi-level example based learning method is effective for partially supervised text classification, and outperforms the existing popular methods such as Biased-SVM, ROC-SVM, S-EM and WL.

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