Adversarial Robustness of Time-Series Classification for Crystal Collimator Alignment

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 7 Apr 2026] Adversarial Robustness of Time-Series Classification for Crystal Collimator Alignment Xaver Fink, Borja Fernandez Adiego, Daniele Mirarchi, Eloise Matheson, Alvaro Garcia Gonzales, Gianmarco Ricci, Joost-Pieter Katoen In this paper, we analyze and improve the adversarial robustness of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that assists crystal-collimator alignment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by classifying a beam-loss monitor (BLM) time series during crystal rotation. We formalize a local robustness property for this classifier under an adversarial threat model based on real-world plausibility. Building on established parameterized input-transformation patterns used for transformation- and semantic-perturbation robustness, we instantiate a preprocessing-aware wrapper for our deployed time-series pipeline: we encode time-series normalization, padding constraints, and structured perturbations as a lightweight differentiable wrapper in front of the CNN, so that existing gradient-based robustness frameworks can operate on the deployed pipeline. For formal verification, data-dependent preprocessing such as per-window z-normalization introduces nonlinear operators that require verifier-specific abstractions. We therefore focus on attack-based robustness estimates and pipeline-checked validity by benchmarking robustness with the frameworks Foolbox and ART. Adversarial fine-tuning of the resulting CNN improves robust accuracy by up to 18.6 % without degrading clean accuracy. Finally, we extend robustness on time-series data beyond single windows to sequence-level robustness for sliding-window classification, introduce adversarial sequences as counterexamples to a temporal robustness requirement over full scans, and observe attack-induced misclassifications that persist across adjacent windows. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2604.06289 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.06289v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.06289 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xaver Fink [view email] [v1] Tue, 7 Apr 2026 13:19:09 UTC (1,997 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)