Mechanism underlying Quality Corruption in deployable spiking detectors

Identify the internal mechanism by which the hardware‑deployable spiking pipeline represented by EMS‑YOLO exhibits Quality Corruption under untargeted adversarial attacks, including clarifying the roles of membrane dynamics and other substrate‑specific components that produce count‑preserving accuracy collapse.

Background

The study presents evidence that gradients are informative and that membrane dynamics form an exploitable attack surface only in the deployable pipeline, yet it does not pinpoint the precise mechanism that yields Quality Corruption.

While the authors characterize where Quality Corruption occurs and how to detect/diagnose it (via QCI and FMP), they explicitly note that the mechanism itself is unresolved, underscoring the need for mechanistic understanding beyond empirical observation.

References

The mechanism remains an open question, but the safety consequence --- silent failure under standard monitoring --- does not depend on identifying it.

— Fluently Lying: Adversarial Robustness Can Be Substrate-Dependent  (2604.00605 - Kang et al., 1 Apr 2026) in Section 6, Discussion, What the evidence constrains