aiqbench analysis
This research exposes critical vulnerabilities in Vision Language Models (VLMs) by demonstrating how small, imperceptible perturbations to visual inputs can force these systems into generating specific false descriptions or disrupting their reasoning. By optimizing attacks solely on the vision encoder rather than the full architecture, researchers achieved effective evasion with significantly reduced computational costs across multiple open-source models like Qwen2.5-VL and Phi-3.5-Vision. These findings underscore an urgent need for improved robustness mechanisms to secure multimodal AI systems against adversarial manipulation in safety-critical applications.
Breaking the weakest link to evade vision language models
arXiv:2608.18938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as a critical component of multimodal AI systems, enabling joint reasoning over visual and textual inputs in real-world and safety-critical applications. Despite their growing deployment, the robustness of VLMs against adversarial threats remains insufficiently explored, particularly in the context of evasion attacks targeting multimodal alignment. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of VLMs to adversarial perturbations applied to visual inputs and study two attack settings: untargeted attacks, where the goal is to disrupt the model's interpretation of the original image, and targeted attacks, where the adversary aims to force the model to generate a specific semantic description unrelated to the original image. To efficiently generate adversarial examples, we propose a gradient-based attack method that performs optimization exclusively on the vision encoder of the VLM rather than on the entire multimodal architecture. This design significantly reduces the computational cost and resource requirements of the attack while maintaining strong effectiveness. We evaluate our approach on several open-source VLMs, including Qwen2.5-VL, Granite-Vision, FastVLM, and Phi-3.5-Vision, and show that small, human-imperceptible perturbations can substantially alter the textual interpretation produced by the models. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of modern VLMs to adversarial manipulation and emphasize the need for improved robustness and security mechanisms in multimodal AI systems.
Abstract:Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as a critical component of multimodal AI systems, enabling joint reasoning over visual and textual inputs in real-world and safety-critical applications. Despite their growing deployment, the robustness of VLMs against adversarial threats remains insufficiently explored, particularly in the context of evasion attacks targeting multimodal alignment. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of VLMs to adversarial perturbations applied to visual inputs and study two attack settings: untargeted attacks, where the goal is to disrupt the model's interpretation of the original image, and targeted attacks, where the adversary aims to force the model to generate a specific semantic description unrelated to the original image. To efficiently generate adversarial examples, we propose a gradient-based attack method that performs optimization exclusively on the vision encoder of the VLM rather than on the entire multimodal architecture. This design significantly reduces the computational cost and resource requirements of the attack while maintaining strong effectiveness. We evaluate our approach on several open-source VLMs, including Qwen2.5-VL, Granite-Vision, FastVLM, and Phi-3.5-Vision, and show that small, human-imperceptible perturbations can substantially alter the textual interpretation produced by the models. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of modern VLMs to adversarial manipulation and emphasize the need for improved robustness and security mechanisms in multimodal AI systems.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.18938 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.18938v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.18938 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 308 words
