AugTrans: Boosting Adversarial Transferability in Object Detection with a Dynamic, Object-Aware Augmentation Pipeline

Adversarial examples in object detection frequently fail to transfer between different models because attacks overfit to the source model’s architecture and feature space. We propose AugTrans, a framework that addresses this limitation through input-space regularization. Our key innovation is a multi-stage augmentation pipeline that incorporates object-level semantic awareness into transformation design. The pipeline comprises three novel components: dynamic object-centric rotation with adaptive scheduling, multi-box aware resizing based on ground-truth annotations, and composite noise injection. These transformations are integrated within the Expectation over Transformation (EOT) framework. By optimizing perturbations to remain effective across semantically meaningful transformations, our method forces attacks to target vulnerabilities shared across architectures. Experiments on MS COCO demonstrate that our method reduces YOLOv5s mean Average Precision (AP) from 32.6% to 2.06%, substantially outperforming prior general-purpose transfer methods on one-stage detectors. All AP values denote COCO-style mean Average Precision (mAP@[0.5:0.95]) unless noted. Importantly, our method maintains effectiveness when using predicted bounding boxes (1.93% AP), eliminating the ground-truth dependency for practical black-box scenarios. Our approach also demonstrates competitive transferability to transformer-based detectors (DETR-R50 AP: 2.8%, DINO-R50 AP: 5.4%), although specialized transformer-specific methods achieve superior performance when the target architecture is known. These results establish that semantically aware augmentation constitutes an effective strategy for generating transferable attacks. We discuss both the security implications and potential defensive applications of our findings.