Paper Detail

Low Rank Adaptation for Adversarial Perturbation

Han Liu, Shanghao Shi, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Chongjie Zhang, Ning Zhang

arxiv Score 11.2

Published 2026-04-30 · First seen 2026-05-01

General AI

Abstract

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which leverages the insight that model updates typically reside in a low-dimensional space, has significantly improved the training efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) by updating neural network layers using low-rank matrices. Since the generation of adversarial examples is an optimization process analogous to model training, this naturally raises the question: Do adversarial perturbations exhibit a similar low-rank structure? In this paper, we provide both theoretical analysis and extensive empirical investigation across various attack methods, model architectures, and datasets to show that adversarial perturbations indeed possess an inherently low-rank structure. This insight opens up new opportunities for improving both adversarial attacks and defenses. We mainly focus on leveraging this low-rank property to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of black-box adversarial attacks, which often suffer from excessive query requirements. Our method follows a two-step approach. First, we use a reference model and auxiliary data to guide the projection of gradients into a low-dimensional subspace. Next, we confine the perturbation search in black-box attacks to this low-rank subspace, significantly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the adversarial attacks. We evaluated our approach across a range of attack methods, benchmark models, datasets, and threat models. The results demonstrate substantial and consistent improvements in the performance of our low-rank adversarial attacks compared to conventional methods.

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BibTeX

@article{liu2026low,
  title = {Low Rank Adaptation for Adversarial Perturbation},
  author = {Han Liu and Shanghao Shi and Yevgeniy Vorobeychik and Chongjie Zhang and Ning Zhang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which leverages the insight that model updates typically reside in a low-dimensional space, has significantly improved the training efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) by updating neural network layers using low-rank matrices. Since the generation of adversarial examples is an optimization process analogous to model training, this naturally raises the question: Do adversarial perturbations exhibit a similar low-rank structure? In this paper, we provide both the},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27487},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.CR},
  eprint = {2604.27487},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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