SDM: A Powerful Tool for Evaluating Model Robustness

Gradient-based attacks are important methods for evaluating model robustness. However, since the proposal of APGD, it has been difficult for such methods to achieve significant breakthroughs. To achieve such an effect, we first analyze the issue of "high-loss non-adversarial examples" that degrades attack performance in previous methods, and prove that this issue arises from inappropriate objectives for adversarial example generation. Subsequently, we reconstruct the objective as "maximizing the difference between the non-ground-truth label probability upper bound and the ground-truth label probability", and proposes a novel and powerful gradient-based attack method named Sequential Difference Maximization (SDM). SDM establishes a three-layer optimization framework of "cycle-stage-step". It adopts the negative probability loss function and the Directional Probability Difference Ratio (DPDR) loss function in the initial and subsequent optimization stages, respectively, and approaches the ideal objective of adversarial example generation via stage-wise sequential optimization. Experiments demonstrate that compared with previous state-of-the-art methods, SDM not only achieves stronger attack performance but also exhibits superior cost-effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/X-L-Liu/ICML-SDM.

Emergent Dexterity via Diverse Resets and Large-Scale Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning in massively parallel physics simulations has driven major progress in sim-to-real robot learning. However, current approaches remain brittle and task-specific, relying on extensive per-task engineering to design rewards, curricula, and demonstrations. Even with this engineering, they often fail on long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks and do not meaningfully scale with compute, as performance quickly saturates when training revisits the same narrow regions of state space. We introduce \Method, a simple and scalable framework that enables on-policy reinforcement learning to robustly solve a broad class of dexterous manipulation tasks using a single reward function, fixed algorithm hyperparameters, no curricula, and no human demonstrations. Our key insight is that long-horizon exploration can be dramatically simplified by using simulator resets to systematically expose the RL algorithm to the diverse set of robot-object interactions which underlie dexterous manipulation. \Method\ programmatically generates such resets with minimal human input, converting additional compute directly into broader behavioral coverage and continued performance gains. We show that \Method\ gracefully scales to long-horizon dexterous manipulation tasks beyond the capabilities of existing approaches and is able to learn robust policies over significantly wider ranges of initial conditions than baselines. Finally, we distill \Method \ into visuomotor policies which display robust retrying behavior and substantially higher success rates than baselines when transferred to the real world zero-shot. Project webpage: https://omnireset.github.io