Lin, Di
Casual Inference via Style Bias Deconfounding for Domain Generalization
Li, Jiaxi, Lin, Di, Chen, Hao, Liu, Hongying, Wan, Liang, Feng, Wei
Deep neural networks (DNNs) often struggle with out-of-distribution data, limiting their reliability in diverse realworld applications. To address this issue, domain generalization methods have been developed to learn domain-invariant features from single or multiple training domains, enabling generalization to unseen testing domains. However, existing approaches usually overlook the impact of style frequency within the training set. This oversight predisposes models to capture spurious visual correlations caused by style confounding factors, rather than learning truly causal representations, thereby undermining inference reliability. In this work, we introduce Style Deconfounding Causal Learning (SDCL), a novel causal inference-based framework designed to explicitly address style as a confounding factor. Our approaches begins with constructing a structural causal model (SCM) tailored to the domain generalization problem and applies a backdoor adjustment strategy to account for style influence. Building on this foundation, we design a style-guided expert module (SGEM) to adaptively clusters style distributions during training, capturing the global confounding style. Additionally, a back-door causal learning module (BDCL) performs causal interventions during feature extraction, ensuring fair integration of global confounding styles into sample predictions, effectively reducing style bias. The SDCL framework is highly versatile and can be seamlessly integrated with state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. Extensive experiments across diverse natural and medical image recognition tasks validate its efficacy, demonstrating superior performance in both multi-domain and the more challenging single-domain generalization scenarios.
SceneTAP: Scene-Coherent Typographic Adversarial Planner against Vision-Language Models in Real-World Environments
Cao, Yue, Xing, Yun, Zhang, Jie, Lin, Di, Zhang, Tianwei, Tsang, Ivor, Liu, Yang, Guo, Qing
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual content. While existing works demonstrate these models' vulnerability to deliberately placed adversarial texts, such texts are often easily identifiable as anomalous. In this paper, we present the first approach to generate scene-coherent typographic adversarial attacks that mislead advanced LVLMs while maintaining visual naturalness through the capability of the LLM-based agent. Our approach addresses three critical questions: what adversarial text to generate, where to place it within the scene, and how to integrate it seamlessly. We propose a training-free, multi-modal LLM-driven scene-coherent typographic adversarial planning (SceneTAP) that employs a three-stage process: scene understanding, adversarial planning, and seamless integration. The SceneTAP utilizes chain-of-thought reasoning to comprehend the scene, formulate effective adversarial text, strategically plan its placement, and provide detailed instructions for natural integration within the image. This is followed by a scene-coherent TextDiffuser that executes the attack using a local diffusion mechanism. We extend our method to real-world scenarios by printing and placing generated patches in physical environments, demonstrating its practical implications. Extensive experiments show that our scene-coherent adversarial text successfully misleads state-of-the-art LVLMs, including ChatGPT-4o, even after capturing new images of physical setups. Our evaluations demonstrate a significant increase in attack success rates while maintaining visual naturalness and contextual appropriateness. This work highlights vulnerabilities in current vision-language models to sophisticated, scene-coherent adversarial attacks and provides insights into potential defense mechanisms.