Semantic Hierarchy-Guided Adversarial Attack for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles employ semantic segmentation as a foundational component for perception and scene understanding, upon which driving decisions can be informed. Despite their performance, these deep learning models remain susceptible to subtle input perturbations that can cause severe deviation in model output. To enhance algorithmic robustness by examining such vulnerabilities, researchers have investigated adversarial examples, which are visually imperceptible yet can severely degrade model performance. However, traditional attacks produce arbitrary misclassifications that ignore semantic relationships, making the attack less effective. This letter introduces a semantic hierarchy-guided adversarial attack (SHAA), a white-box adversarial attack against semantic segmentation for autonomous driving. By combining semantic hierarchy and adaptive momentum-based updates across the image, SHAA produces semantically nontrivial yet highly effective perturbations. The SHAA method exposes deeper vulnerabilities with a higher attack success rate in semantic segmentation than existing methods, aiding the design of a more resilient perception system for autonomous vehicles.