Architecture Components
Security issues in vision-language models
12 matching entries out of 131 in this category
KoNA measures whether vision-language models answer valid image questions while refusing unsafe components or correcting unsupported premises. Its 9,300 question-answer pairs include mixed and fully answerable controls.
Source: arXiv
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…
Source: arXiv
Reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training for explicit chain-of-thought reasoning (e.g., GRPO) in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) inadvertently degrades safety alignment, rendering the models highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks. The vulnerability is caused by "conditional coverage collapse" during the initial phases of chain-of-thought generation. Under adversarial conditioning (text or image), the reasoning policy assigns vanishing probability mass to safe…
Source: arXiv
A vulnerability exists in the post-training alignment of Flow Matching models (specifically FLUX.1-dev) when utilizing Visual Foundation Models (VFM) (e.g., DINOv3b) as discriminators or when employing standalone Reward Gradient optimization (e.g., HPSv3). These feedback mechanisms lack sufficient capacity or structural guidance to constrain the generative policy, making the discriminator's gradients susceptible to "reward hacking." Consequently, the generative policy over-optimizes for the…
Source: arXiv
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to semantic-ensemble adversarial attacks. Current adversarial fine-tuning defenses for CLIP rely on minimizing the cosine similarity between an image and a single hand-crafted template (e.g., "A photo of a {label}"). This creates a vulnerability where adversarial examples (AEs) overfit to specific phrasings rather than the core class semantics. Attackers can bypass these defenses by generating semantic-aware adversarial…
Source: arXiv
Multimodal Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems (MLLM-RecSys) are vulnerable to Cross-Modal Interactive Data Poisoning. Attackers can manipulate the system by injecting compromised user-generated content (UGC) that contains synchronized, coupled perturbations across both textual and visual modalities. While MLLMs naturally filter out single-modality noise via cross-modal consensus, this vulnerability exploits the consensus mechanism itself. By leveraging cross-modal attention to…
Source: arXiv
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…
Source: arXiv
A vulnerability exists in the fine-tuning lifecycle of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) derived from open-source base models, termed the "grey-box threat." Adversaries with white-box access to a public base model (e.g., Qwen2-VL) can generate universal adversarial images that successfully bypass safety guardrails in proprietary, fine-tuned downstream variants. This is achieved via the Simulated Ensemble Attack (SEA), which combines two techniques: Fine-tuning Trajectory Simulation (FTS), where…
Source: arXiv
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to "Secondary Risks," a class of non-adversarial failures where the model generates harmful, misleading, or unsafe outputs in response to benign, non-malicious user prompts. Unlike jailbreaks which require adversarial inputs, secondary risks arise from imperfect generalization and alignment failures during standard interactions. This vulnerability manifests primarily in two primitives: 1. Excessive…
Source: arXiv
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to coupled cross-modal jailbreak attacks that combine continuous visual perturbations with discrete textual manipulations. Because standard alignment and single-modality defenses (such as text-only safety tuning or isolated vision-encoder adversarial training) fail to secure the cross-modal interaction, attackers can simultaneously apply gradient-based noise (e.g., PGD) to input images and adversarial suffixes (e.g., GCG) to text prompts…
Source: arXiv