Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability in Infrared Vision-Language Models (IR-VLMs) allows attackers to systematically degrade open-ended semantic understanding—compromising classification, captioning, and Visual Question Answering (VQA)—via a physically deployable Universal Curved-Grid Patch (UCGP). Instead of manipulating explicit text labels, the attack disrupts the clean-category manifold in the model's visual representation space by maximizing orthogonal deviation energy from the principal subspace and forcing…

A vulnerability in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) relying on shared visual-textual representation spaces allows attackers to induce transferable cross-task semantic failures using an X-shaped Sparse Pixel Attack (XSPA). Attackers craft imperceptible adversarial perturbations restricted to a fixed geometric prior—two intersecting diagonal lines comprising approximately 1.76% of the image pixels. By jointly optimizing a classification objective with cross-task semantic guidance (target-semantic…

LLaVA-v1.5-7B, when deployed as a vision-language autonomous agent, is highly vulnerable to adversarial image perturbations. An attacker can inject imperceptibly modified images into a web environment (such as an e-commerce storefront). When the VLM agent captures a screenshot containing the perturbed image, the visual noise forces the model to misclassify the scene and output incorrect, structured JSON actions. This allows an attacker to hijack the agent's task execution, bypassing the user's…

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…

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…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Model (LLM) context compression architectures (specifically compressor-decoder setups) characterized as the "Size-Fidelity Paradox." When scaling up the parameter count of the compressor model (e.g., beyond 4B parameters in Qwen-3 and LLaMA-3.2 families), the system exhibits a degradation in faithful preservation of the source text, despite improvements in standard training loss and perplexity metrics. This degradation manifests through two primary…

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…

A vulnerability in Large Language Model-based Retrieval (LLMR) systems allows attackers to intentionally hide specific documents from being retrieved (e.g., in RAG pipelines or search engines) by appending a small number of adversarially crafted, query-agnostic tokens. The attack operates in a complete black-box setting: it requires no knowledge of the victim's queries, the target retrieval model's parameters, or the underlying document corpus. By utilizing Document-Query Adversarial (DQ-A)…

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…

A vulnerability exists in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) utilizing visual token compression mechanisms (e.g., VisionZip, VisPruner) to reduce inference latency. The vulnerability stems from an optimization-inference mismatch where standard adversarial defenses assume full-token processing, while the deployed model utilizes a subset of tokens selected via importance metrics (typically attention scores).