DPSF: A Dynamic Patch Shape Selection Framework for Cross-Model Transferable Adversarial Attacks
Adversarial patch attacks are core tools to evaluate adversarial robustness in remote sensing image classification, yet existing methods with fixed patch shapes and single-model optimization yield poor cross-architecture black-box transferability. This paper proposes the Dynamic Patch Shape Selection Framework (DPSF), which integrates a 12-shape patch library, adaptive category matching and multi-model joint optimization with dynamic weight adjustment under a strict 2% patch area constraint. We test DPSF on the UC Merced dataset over eight random split seeds, taking ResNet101, DenseNet161 and VGG19 as held-out black-box models. Under the five-source protocol, DPSF-full achieves mean accuracy drop (ACCD) of 0.380 ± 0.034, adversarial accuracy (Adv Acc) 0.593 ± 0.039, attack success rate (ASR) 0.393 ± 0.037 (on clean-correct test samples, averaged over held-out evaluators), union success rate (USR) 0.581 ± 0.046, and intersection success rate (ISR) 0.188 ± 0.023. With the ResNet50 single-source setting, DPSF-single obtains mean ACCD = 0.275 ± 0.109, surpassing Sparse-RS (0.033 ± 0.012) and Cross-shaped adversarial patch attack (CSPA) (0.232 ± 0.029). Supplementary results on CIFAR-10, Tiny-ImageNet and Mini-ImageNet illustrate cross-scale transfer trends. This work builds a reproducible digital-domain robustness benchmark for aerial land-use scene classification.
Authors
- Haosu Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5069-1095)
- Bingshu Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2603-8328)
- Han Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7750-0028)
- Laixian Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6437-1289)
- Boqi Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4880-040X)
- Aihong Shangguan
Institutions
- Northwestern Polytechnical University (CN)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (CN)
- Space Engineering University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Remote Sensing
- Published
- 2026-07-22
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18142426
- Primary Topic
- Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Natural Science Foundation for Young Scientists of Shanxi Province