Preprocessing Failure and Adversarial Detection in Depthwise-Separable Edge Vision Systems
cs.CV, cs.CR
Submitted: 2026-09-03
Updated: 2026-09-03
Comments: 14 pages
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Preprocessing-based defenses are the standard first-line response to adversarial attacks on edge vision systems, requiring no retraining, no architectural changes, and widely recommended as
Terminology
Abstract
Preprocessing-based defenses are the standard first-line response to adversarial attacks on edge vision systems, requiring no retraining, no architectural changes, and widely recommended as model-agnostic mitigations. Yet the foundational evaluations of these defenses were conducted on residual or Inception-class architectures, not on the depthwise-separable CNNs that dominate edge deployments. This untested assumption leaves a gap in the security evaluation literature. This paper closes that gap by evaluating six preprocessing defenses against adversarial perturbations across both architecture families. Across all perturbation levels and defenses tested, the two depthwise-separable architectures show consistently poor recovery while the residual architecture shows partial recovery; ablation results are consistent with an architectural rather than parametric explanation, though only three architectures and one attack family are evaluated. Crucially, this failure is not merely a negative result. The same output divergence that disqualifies preprocessing as a recovery mechanism reveals a detection opportunity: preprocessing consistently disrupts clean predictions while leaving adversarial predictions largely unchanged, an asymmetry that is directly measurable without retraining or architectural modification. We further show that standard image quality metrics are unreliable proxies for defense effectiveness, a methodological gap in current evaluation practice. A practitioner decision framework is provided for adversarially resilient edge vision deployment.
Sources
- A study of the effect of JPG compression on adversarial images
- On the Adversarial Robustness of Vision Transformers
Related papers
- Loss Knows Best: Detecting Annotation Errors in Videos via Loss Trajectories
- AnchorWeave: World-Consistent Video Generation with Retrieved Local Spatial Memories
- Benchmarking the Robustness of Foundation Models for Mammography under Domain Shift
- MambaX-Net: Dual-Input Mamba-Enhanced Cross-Attention Network for Longitudinal MRI Segmentation
- TeleOCR: Navigating Document Parsing Across Digital and Camera-Captured Documents
- A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models