attacking

Definition

Two readings. In security work it is literal and adversarial: crafting inputs, prompts, or queries that make a model misbehave, leak data, or be extracted — the counterpart of "defend." Elsewhere it is a plain metaphor for tackling something difficult, as in "attacking the saddle point problem," where nothing adversarial is involved. The object disambiguates: you attack a model, or you attack a problem.

Explainers using this term

• Convexity and Optimization — Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Isn't ConvexIdentifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization