Papers › Finding Physical Adversarial Examples for Autonomous Driving with Fast and...

Finding Physical Adversarial Examples for Autonomous Driving with Fast and Differentiable Image Compositing

17 Oct 2020arXiv:2010.08844archive 2025-07-28

Jinghan Yang, Adith Boloor, Ayan Chakrabarti, Xuan Zhang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

There is considerable evidence that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations applied directly to their digital inputs. However, it remains an open question whether this translates to vulnerabilities in real systems. For example, an attack on self-driving cars would in practice entail modifying the driving environment, which then impacts the video inputs to the car's controller, thereby indirectly leading to incorrect driving decisions. Such attacks require accounting for system dynamics and tracking viewpoint changes. We propose a scalable approach for finding adversarial modifications of a simulated autonomous driving environment using a differentiable approximation for the mapping from environmental modifications (rectangles on the road) to the corresponding video inputs to the controller neural network. Given the parameters of the rectangles, our proposed differentiable mapping composites them onto pre-recorded video streams of the original environment, accounting for geometric and color variations. Moreover, we propose a multiple trajectory sampling approach that enables our attacks to be robust to a car's self-correcting behavior. When combined with a neural network-based controller, our approach allows the design of adversarial modifications through end-to-end gradient-based optimization. Using the Carla autonomous driving simulator, we show that our approach is significantly more scalable and far more effective at identifying autonomous vehicle vulnerabilities in simulation experiments than a state-of-the-art approach based on Bayesian Optimization.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

jinghanY/physicalAttackImageComposition officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Autonomous DrivingBayesian OptimizationOpen-Ended Question AnsweringSelf-Driving Cars

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

CARLAEntropy RegularizationPPO

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections