Lisbon, March 17, 2025

Youverse is proud to announce its collaboration with the Institute of Systems and Robotics - University of Coimbra (ISR-UC) in organizing the 2025 Adversarial Attack Challenge (AAC), a groundbreaking competition aimed at enhancing the security of face recognition (FR) systems against adversarial attacks. The challenge will take place as part of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) 2025, bringing together leading experts in AI, cybersecurity, and biometricsto tackle one of the most pressing threats to modern authentication technologies.

Face recognition is widely used in security systems, financial transactions, and border control, yet remains vulnerable to adversarial attacks—subtle manipulations of images that can deceive deep learning models while remaining undetectable to the human eye. These attacks pose serious risks, including identity fraud and unauthorized access. The AAC aims to drive innovation in adversarial defense mechanisms, ensuring that biometric authentication systems remain secure, trustworthy, and resilient in real-world applications.

The AAC competition will focus on two key challenges:

• Detection track – Participants will develop models capable of distinguishing between adversarially manipulated images and clean samples.
• Resilience track – Competitors will create face recognition models that maintain high accuracy even when subjected to adversarial attacks.

“Adversarial attacks pose one of the most pressing challenges to modern biometric security,” said Miguel Lourenço, CPO and Head of AI at Youverse. “With this challenge, we are bringing together the best minds in AI and cybersecurity to develop the next generation of defense mechanisms for face recognition. The ability to detect and withstand adversarial manipulations is crucial to ensuring the reliability of biometric authentication.”

Nuno Gonçalves, Research Coordinator and VIS Team Leader at ISR-UC, added: “With AI technologies evolving at an unprecedented pace, it is imperative to develop proactive defenses against both known and unforeseen biometric threats. This challenge will not only enhance detection capabilities but also improve the resilience of future biometric systems.”

The competition is open to industry professionals, academic researchers, and individual contributors, with monetary prizes of up to $3,500 for open-source solutions. The top three teams in each track will be invited to co-author a peer-reviewed paper summarizing the competition results, to be presented at IJCB 2025. Additionally, the initiative aims to establish a public adversarial attack library, open-source datasets, and benchmarking tools to foster ongoing research in biometric security.

The competition officially opens on March 17, 2025, with results to be announced in June 2025. Full details, including submission guidelines and datasets, will be available on the official competition website.

For further information, visit IJCB-AAC 2025 or contact the organizers at adversarial@youverse.id.