Vulnerability analysis of transformer-based optical character recognition to adversarial attacks
Lucas Beerens, Desmond John Higham · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences · 2026
We present a novel framework to assess the resilience of state-of-the-art transformer-based optical character recognition (TrOCR) models. In this way, we develop new untargeted and targeted attack algorithms. On a benchmark handwriting dataset, we show that adversarial perturbations to the input reveal dramatic vulnerabilities without being noticeable to the eye. This article is part of the theme issue 'Safe, secure and robust AI for safety-critical systems'.