ACAttack: Adaptive Cross Attacking RGB-T Tracker via Multi-Modal Response Decoupling

The research on adversarial attacks against trackers primarily concentrates on the RGB modality, whereas the methodology for attacking RGB-T multi-modal trackers has seldom been explored so far. This work represents an innovative attempt to develop an adaptive cross attack framework via multi-modal response decoupling, generating multi-modal adversarial patches to evade RGB-T trackers. Specifically, a modal-aware adaptive attack strategy is introduced to weaken the modality with high common information contribution alternately and iteratively, achieving the modal decoupling attack. In order to perturb the judgment of the modal balance mechanism in the tracker, we design a modal disturbance loss to increase the distance of the response map of the single-modal adversarial samples in the tracker. Besides, we also propose a novel spatio-temporal joint attack loss to progressively deteriorate the tracker’s perception of the target. Moreover, the design of the shared adversarial shape enables the generated multi-modal adversarial patches to be readily deployed in real-world scenarios, effectively reducing the interference of the patch posting process on the shape attack of the infrared adversarial layer. Extensive digital and physical domain experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our multi-modal adversarial patch attack. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xinyu-Xiang/ACAttack.