{"paper":{"title":"Low-Cost Hard-Label Adversarial Attack with Theoretical Foundations","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CR"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Fengpeng Li, Isao Echizen, Jiantao Zhou, Jun Liu, Leo Yu Zhang","submitted_at":"2026-01-17T02:47:47Z","abstract_excerpt":"Hard-label black-box attacks, relying solely on top-1 predictions, represent one of the most challenging yet practically threat models. Despite recent progress, existing approaches face two key limitations: (1) they overlook the critical role of initialization, focusing primarily on optimization strategies; and (2) they rely heavily on empirical heuristics without theoretical guarantees. To bridge this gap, we establish a unified theoretical framework showing that existing sign-flipping hard-label attacks can be understood as approximating the true gradient sign. Guided by this principled anal"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2601.14300","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2601.14300/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}