# TASAR: Transfer-based Attack on Skeletal Action Recognition

Source: [TASAR: Transfer-based Attack on Skeletal Action Recognition](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa76f11e209131cea7020c>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:46:56.735Z

Authors: Yunfeng Diao, Baiqi Wu, Ruixuan Zhang, Ajian Liu, Xiaoshuai Hao, Xingxing Wei, Meng Wang, He Wang

Published: 2024-09-04T07:20:01.000Z

## Abstract

Skeletal sequence data, as a widely employed representation of human actions, are crucial in Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Recently, adversarial attacks have been proposed in this area, which exposes potential security concerns, and more importantly provides a good tool for model robustness test. Within this research, transfer-based attack is an important tool as it mimics the real-world scenario where an attacker has no knowledge of the target model, but is under-explored in Skeleton-based HAR (S-HAR). Consequently, existing S-HAR attacks exhibit weak adversarial transferability and the reason remains largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon via the characterization of the loss function. We find that one prominent indicator of poor transferability is the low smoothness of the loss function. Led by this observation, we improve the transferability by properly smoothening the loss when computing the adversarial examples. This leads to the first Transfer-based Attack on Skeletal Action Recognition, TASAR. TASAR explores the smoothened model posterior of pre-trained surrogates, which is achieved by a new post-train Dual Bayesian optimization strategy. Furthermore, unlike existing transfer-based methods which overlook the temporal coherence within sequences, TASAR incorporates motion dynamics into the Bayesian attack, effectively disrupting the spatial-temporal coherence of S-HARs. For exhaustive evaluation, we build the first large-scale robust S-HAR benchmark, comprising 7 S-HAR models, 10 attack methods, 3 S-HAR datasets and 2 defense models. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of TASAR. Our benchmark enables easy comparisons for future studies, with the code available in the https://github.com/yunfengdiao/Skeleton-Robustness-Benchmark.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Black-box Adversarial Motion Attack on 100STYLE](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/black-box-adversarial-motion-attack-on-100style.md>): Black-box Adversarial Motion Attack; 100STYLE; Success Rate: 51.97.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02483>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02483.pdf>)
