CAPG: Context-Aware Perturbation Generation for Multi-Label Adversarial Attacks

Multi-label deep learning models are widely used in real-world applications where predictions depend on the joint presence of several semantically correlated labels. However, existing adversarial attacks largely overlook these inter-label dependencies, often perturbing outputs indiscriminately and producing structurally implausible or easily detectable changes. This paper presents CAPG (Context-Aware Perturbation Generation), a white-box, label-space targeted adversarial framework for generating selective and contextually consistent perturbations in multi-label settings. CAPG incorporates correlation-weighted regularization into the adversarial objective, enabling targeted manipulation of specific labels while preserving the contextual integrity of non-target outputs. Using the Pascal VOC 2012 dataset and a ResNet-101 multi-label classifier, we show that CAPG achieves higher Attack Success Rates (ASR) and substantially improved Contextual Consistency Scores (CCSs) than FGSM, PGD, CW, and DeepFool under identical perturbation budgets. CAPG also produces lower perceptual distortion, yielding adversarial examples that better preserve contextual structure. These results highlight the importance of correlation-aware adversarial evaluation for assessing the robustness of modern multi-label deep learning systems.