Recent works reveal that adversarial augmentation benefits the generalization of neural networks (NNs) if used in an appropriate manner. In this paper, we introduce Temporal Adversarial Augmentation (TA), a novel video augmentation technique that utilizes temporal attention. Unlike conventional adversarial augmentation, TA is specifically designed to shift the attention distributions of neural networks with respect to video clips by maximizing a temporal-related loss function. We demonstrate that TA will obtain diverse temporal views, which significantly affect the focus of neural networks. Training with these examples remedies the flaw of unbalanced temporal information perception and enhances the ability to defend against temporal shifts, ultimately leading to better generalization. To leverage TA, we propose Temporal Video Adversarial Fine-tuning (TAF) framework for improving video representations. TAF is a model-agnostic, generic, and interpretability-friendly training strategy. We evaluate TAF with four powerful models (TSM, GST, TAM, and TPN) over three challenging temporal-related benchmarks (Something-something V1&V2 and diving48). Experimental results demonstrate that TAF effectively improves the test accuracy of these models with notable margins without introducing additional parameters or computational costs. As a byproduct, TAF also improves the robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. Code is available at https://github.com/jinhaoduan/TAF.

The rapid adoption of diffusion models in medical imaging has raised significant concerns regarding data privacy, especially their susceptibility to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). However, the privacy risks associated with diffusion models in the medical domain remain underexplored compared to natural images. In this study, we propose a novel grey-box attack framework, termed the Discrete Encoding-Based Membership Inference Attack (DEB), inspired by Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models (DDCM). DEB injects semantically meaningful noise via a discrete codebook strategy and identifies training samples by analyzing the model’s output trajectory under this discrete encoding, specifically measuring the average of intermediate predictions across selected time steps. We conduct an evaluation of MIAs across natural images and five representative datasets from the MedMNIST collection. Our experiments reveal that the susceptibility of diffusion models is highly dependent on the data modality; for instance, while certain datasets exhibit near-complete vulnerability, others like PathMNIST demonstrate strong inherent resistance to MIAs. Furthermore, DEB demonstrates superior performance compared to existing baselines (e.g., SecMI, PIA, SimA), particularly on challenging datasets. For example, DEB achieves a True Positive Rate at 1% False Positive Rate (TPR @ 1% FPR) of 60.3% on CIFAR-10, significantly outperforming the SimA baseline (35.9%). Notably, even on the highly resistant PathMNIST dataset, DEB attains a 10.2% TPR @ 1% FPR, establishing a substantial advantage over the PIA baseline (1.1%). This work provides practical insights into the privacy risks inherent in diffusion models and emphasizes that model providers should carefully assess these vulnerabilities when exposing intermediate generation APIs.

Recent works reveal that adversarial augmentation benefits the generalization of neural networks (NNs) if used in an appropriate manner. In this paper, we introduce Temporal Adversarial Augmentation (TA), a novel video augmentation technique that utilizes temporal attention. Unlike conventional adversarial augmentation, TA is specifically designed to shift the attention distributions of neural networks with respect to video clips by maximizing a temporal-related loss function. We demonstrate that TA will obtain diverse temporal views, which significantly affect the focus of neural networks. Training with these examples remedies the flaw of unbalanced temporal information perception and enhances the ability to defend against temporal shifts, ultimately leading to better generalization. To leverage TA, we propose Temporal Video Adversarial Fine-tuning (TAF) framework for improving video representations. TAF is a model-agnostic, generic, and interpretability-friendly training strategy. We evaluate TAF with four powerful models (TSM, GST, TAM, and TPN) over three challenging temporal-related benchmarks (Something-something V1&V2 and diving48). Experimental results demonstrate that TAF effectively improves the test accuracy of these models with notable margins without introducing additional parameters or computational costs. As a byproduct, TAF also improves the robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. Code is available at https://github.com/jinhaoduan/TAF.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest and attention in Transformer-based structures, such as Vision Transformer (ViT) and Vision Multilayer Perceptron (VMLP). Compared with the previous convolution-based structures, the Transformer-based structure under investigation showcases a comparable or superior performance under its distinctive attention-based input token mixer strategy. Introducing adversarial examples as a robustness consideration has had a profound and detrimental impact on the performance of well-established convolution-based structures. This inherent vulnerability to adversarial attacks has also been demonstrated in Transformer-based structures. In this paper, our emphasis lies on investigating the intrinsic robustness of the structure rather than introducing novel defense measures against adversarial attacks. To address the susceptibility to robustness issues, we employ a rational structure design approach to mitigate such vulnerabilities. Specifically, we enhance the adversarial robustness of the structure by increasing the proportion of high-frequency structural robust biases. As a result, we introduce a novel structure called Robust Bias Transformer-based Structure (RBFormer) that shows robust superiority compared to several existing baseline structures. Through a series of extensive experiments, RBFormer outperforms the original structures by a significant margin, achieving an impressive improvement of +16.12% and +5.04% across different evaluation criteria on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1k, respectively.