CertVLA: Certified Defense against Physical Visual Attacks for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are vulnerable to localized physical perturbations, yet existing certified patch defenses target discrete labels and cannot directly certify continuous, temporally correlated actions. We introduce CertVLA, a certified defense for closed-loop VLA control under bounded patch and texture attacks. CertVLA proposes a calibrated region of behaviorally consistent actions, while deterministic covering masks ensure that at least one checked prediction is attack-free. Specifically, CertVLA normalizes action disagreement by the benign variation of each mask pair and accepts a single-mask anchor only when it remains consistent under every second mask. It then calibrates the resulting max-min-max episode score to provide finite-sample clean coverage. Conjoining query-level decisions extends the action certificate to the complete closed-loop rollout. Furthermore, we prove that against any adaptive attacker satisfying the bounded-support threat model, every rollout certified by CertVLA executes only action chunks consistent with attack-erased clean predictions. Under dual-mask rollout correctness, this consistency certificate further guarantees task success. The certificate is independent of patch content, generation method, and physical transformation. Experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate the empirical and certified effectiveness of CertVLA against patch attacks, with additional simulation validation on texture attacks.

Detectors Learn the Wrong Thing: Shortcut-Resistant Adversarial Training Against Physically Realizable Attacks

AI-enabled visual perception systems are increasingly deployed in intelligent transportation infrastructure and autonomous vehicle related applications. However, physically realizable adversarial appearances pose a significant reliability challenge for these safety-critical systems. Adversarial training is effective, but repeated co-occurrence between adversarial texture and positive person instances can cause detectors to treat the texture itself as evidence of object presence, forming a patch texture shortcut. The detector may then treat texture as evidence for the target, causing false detections on texture-only inputs and weakening cross attack generalisation. We propose InsCAT, an instance-level contrastive adversarial training framework that prevents detectors from using adversarial texture as an independent decision cue. SICA aligns adversarial person features with matched clean features and separates them from texture-only negatives, while ROPO and Guard maintain online attack pressure and coordinate training. We evaluate eight independently generated attack textures on rendered nuScenes, INRIAPerson, printed garments, and three detector families. InsCAT achieves an average attack AP of 82.3% on rendered nuScenes, exceeding the strongest baseline by 11.1 points.Relative to AT-Mix, texture FPR decreases from 46.9% to 7.3%. Physical tests yield an F1 score of 96.6% and an FPR of 1.8%. Consistent gains across separately trained detectors demonstrate applicability across architectures with direct inference. The findings show that robust physical detection depends on preserving target related evidence while preventing adversarial texture from becoming an independent decision cu

AdvSerial: Physical Adversarial Attacks on Infrastructure-mounted Pedestrian Detectors via Semantic Feature Suppression

AI-based visual perception systems are increasingly deployed in infrastructure surveillance, including roadside monitoring units, highway cameras, and smart-city pedestrian management systems. The security vulnerability of these systems to physical adversarial attacks poses a direct threat to the reliable operation of transportation infrastructure. We propose AdvSerial, a dynamic 2D--3D joint optimization framework for generating continuous high-angle physical adversarial patches against pedestrian detectors in infrastructure-based scenarios. We UV-map a boundary-aware quilted texture onto 3D garments, combine 2D digital attacks with 3D sparse- and continuous-frame rendering, and explicitly suppress person-specific semantic features while enforcing temporal continuity. A Feature Smooth Quilting strategy reduces visible patch boundaries and bounds cross-seam feature discontinuities. A serial-frame loss encourages long uninterrupted sequences of detection failures. In physical world experiments, AdvSerial achieves a 74.8% attack success rate on YOLO-v5 and degrades mean detection confidence from 84.30% to 39.38%. Experiments spanning eight detectors with different architectures demonstrate strong transferability. Notably, it achieves an $89.71%$ attack success rate on YOLO-v2 and resists both patch-detection defenses (NapGuard) and 3D-temporal perception (Sparse4D-v3). The results reveal persistent, temporally consistent failure modes under high-angle surveillance, and motivate the design of motion-aware and 3D-aware defenses for security-critical infrastructure deployments.

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (<20 kHz), and we further expand our analysis to include how various image and object features are affected by the attacks. Specifically, we performed physical experiments to demonstrate the viability of our attacks on an off-the-shelf object detection model (YOLO11) by resonating a commercially available camera with various frequencies. Based on our results, we provide insights into several factors that make an AI CV system more vulnerable to these attacks, which could help inform the development of future mitigation strategies.