Diffbias: Harnessing diffusion models’ prediction bias for adversarial patch defense

Xudong Ye

doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2026.133009

Diffbias: Harnessing diffusion models’ prediction bias for adversarial patch defense

2026-02-09

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DOI：10.1016/j.neucom.2026.133009

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Adversarial patches pose a significant and real threat to deep neural networks, capable of inducing misclassification in realistic physical scenarios. Developing reliable and robust defense methods against these attacks is a critical application, and current research remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that exploits the fact that unnatural perturbations introduced by adversarial patches can produce prediction biases significantly different from those of clean images during denoising. In the localization stage, our method focuses on the critical denoising steps through an adaptive temporal sampling strategy and introduces an energy metric that fuses kinetic and potential energy to quantify the degree of anomaly in the denoised trajectory. Furthermore, by combining this with the adaptive similarity weighting mechanism and the striding trajectory consistency analysis, our method effectively suppresses the interference of background noise, so as to achieve accurate locking of the patch area. In the restoration phase, the same diffusion model is applied to the patch region to restore the original visual content and integrity. This two-stage architecture shares a unified diffusion model, enabling the localization and inpainting processes to enhance the overall defense performance through information complementarity. Extensive experiments on the INRIA, COCO2017, and APRICOT datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art detection performance under both digital and physical attack types without compromising the recognition accuracy of clean images.

Keywords:

adversarial patches

diffusion models

prediction bias

defense mechanism

image restoration

Diffbias: Harnessing diffusion models’ prediction bias for adversarial patch defense

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