Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability exists in the internal representation mechanisms of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Llama-3 and Qwen series models. The vulnerability allows for high-accuracy "steering" of model outputs, effectively bypassing safety guardrails and refusal mechanisms (jailbreaking) without modifying model weights. By exploiting attention-guided feature learning, an attacker can extract a precise "concept vector" representing refusal behaviors. This is achieved by…

Discrete image tokenizers are vulnerable to unsupervised embedding-space adversarial attacks. Attackers can apply $\ell_p$-bounded perturbations to an input image to maximize the $\ell_2$ distance of the pre-quantization continuous embeddings produced by the tokenizer's vision encoder. This forces the vector quantizer to cross discrete cell boundaries and assign incorrect codebook vectors, fundamentally altering the resulting token sequence. Because the attack targets the pre-quantization…

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based social bot detection systems are vulnerable to an Optimal Transport (OT)-guided evasion attack that manipulates local graph structures under realistic domain constraints. By modeling $k$-hop ego-neighborhoods as probability measures over spatio-temporal features, an attacker can compute an optimal transport plan to identify "cloak templates" (existing bots near the decision boundary that are misclassified as humans). The attacker can then decode this plan into…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to a Stage-wise Attention-Guided Attack (SAGA) that allows for the generation of highly transferable, imperceptible adversarial examples. The vulnerability stems from a positive correlation between regional cross-modal attention scores and adversarial loss sensitivity in LVLMs. An attacker can exploit this by extracting an attention map from a surrogate open-source model (e.g., Qwen3-VL) to identify high-attention "hotspots." SAGA utilizes a…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a transferable targeted adversarial attack known as SGHA-Attack (Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Alignment). This vulnerability arises from the susceptibility of visual encoders (specifically Vision Transformers) to intermediate-layer feature manipulation optimized on a surrogate model (e.g., CLIP). An attacker can craft adversarial images by injecting imperceptible perturbations that enforce semantic consistency with a target text prompt…

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) utilizing independent vision encoders (e.g., ViT) and Large Language Model (LLM) decoders are vulnerable to Split-Image Visual Jailbreak Attacks (SIVA). The vulnerability arises from an architectural and alignment discrepancy: while the vision encoder processes image fragments (splits) in isolation via constrained attention or block-diagonal masks, the LLM decoder aggregates these features via cross-attention to reconstruct the semantic content. Current safety…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Mistral 7B, Gemma 2 9B, and Llama 3 8B, are vulnerable to safety filter bypass via "Emoji-Based Jailbreaking." This adversarial prompt engineering technique exploits the model's tokenization and internal representation of Unicode emoji characters. By utilizing "emoji stuffing" (inserting emojis between textual tokens) or "emoji chaining" (using sequences of emojis as semantic proxies for sensitive terms), attackers can evade keyword-based safety…

Point-based 3D Vision-Language Models (VLMs), specifically PointLLM and GPT4Point, are vulnerable to white-box, gradient-based adversarial attacks. The vulnerability exists in the model's processing of 3D point cloud data, where an attacker can optimize imperceptible geometric perturbations ($\delta$) on the input point cloud ($x$) to manipulate the model's textual output. The paper identifies two specific attack vectors: 1. Vision Attack: Directly perturbs the high-dimensional visual token…

Closed-source Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to Universal Targeted Transferable Adversarial Attacks (UTTAA). An attacker can generate a single, image-agnostic adversarial perturbation ($\delta$) that, when added to any arbitrary source image, steers the victim model to output a description or classification matching a specific target image chosen by the attacker. This vulnerability exploits the transferability of adversarial features from open-source surrogate vision…