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Last analyzed Sep 9, 2026

Language Model Security Database

985 research findings · 1119 evaluated models

Filtered research findings

94 entries

Matches every word across titles, descriptions, sources, affected systems, and models.

Backdoored PEFT adapters and limits of weight-only detection

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Third-party fine-tuning adapters may contain backdoors. Z-PEFT screens adapter weights using spectral features, evaluated on PADBench's 13,300 adapters.

Z-PEFT: Zero-shot Backdoor Detection in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Canonical Spectral Signatures
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B, Llama 2 13B, Qwen 1.5 7B+2 more
  • Llama 2 7B
  • Llama 2 13B
  • Qwen 1.5 7B
  • Flan-T5 XL
  • RoBERTa Base

VLM Visual-Textual Misalignment

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to pixel-level adversarial image perturbations. An attacker can inject $\ell_p$-bounded, human-imperceptible noise into an input image to manipulate the model's multi-modal embedding space. This reliably causes the VLM to generate incorrect textual responses, hallucinate non-existent objects, or misclassify subjects, effectively decoupling the model's reasoning from the actual visual evidence. The vulnerability is exploitable via both white-box…

PDA: Text-Augmented Defense Framework for Robust Vision-Language Models against Adversarial Image Attacks
Evaluated models: LLaVA 1.5 7B, LLaVA 1.5 13B, DeepSeek VL 1.3B+2 more
  • LLaVA 1.5 7B
  • LLaVA 1.5 13B
  • DeepSeek VL 1.3B
  • InternVL3 2B
  • Ovis2 4B

LLM Judge Manipulation

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

Security in LLM-as-a-Judge: A Comprehensive SoK
Evaluated models: GPT-4o, o1, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct+1 more
  • GPT-4o
  • o1
  • Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct
  • Llama 3 70B Instruct

X-Shaped Sparse VLM Attack

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

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…

XSPA: Crafting Imperceptible X-Shaped Sparse Adversarial Perturbations for Transferable Attacks on VLMs
Evaluated models: InstructBLIP

Autoresearch Adversarial Algorithm Discovery

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

GPT-OSS-Safeguard-20B and Meta-SecAlign (70B/8B) are vulnerable to white-box adversarial attacks generated by automated algorithmic recombination (specifically the claude_v63, claude_v82, and claude_v53-oss optimizers). These algorithms significantly outperform standard discrete optimization methods (like GCG) by integrating continuous optimization (ADC) with LayerNorm gradient scaling (LSGM), or by merging momentum-smoothed gradients with directional perturbation candidate selection (DPTO)…

Claudini: Autoresearch Discovers State-of-the-Art Adversarial Attack Algorithms for LLMs
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B, Llama 3 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B+2 more
  • Llama 2 7B
  • Llama 3 8B
  • Qwen 2.5 7B
  • Gemma 2 2B
  • Gemma 7B

VLM E-commerce Attack Surface

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

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…

Adversarial attacks against Modern Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen 2.5 VL 7B Instruct, LLaVA 1.5 7B

MLLM Multi-Paradigm Collaborative

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a highly transferable, black-box adversarial image attack known as the Multi-Paradigm Collaborative Attack (MPCAttack). Attackers can craft imperceptible visual perturbations by jointly aggregating and optimizing semantic feature representations extracted from surrogate models across three distinct learning paradigms: cross-modal alignment (e.g., CLIP), multi-modal understanding (e.g., InternVL3), and visual self-supervised learning…

Multi-Paradigm Collaborative Adversarial Attack Against Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen 2.5 VL 7B Instruct, InternVL3 8B, LLaVA 1.5 7B+3 more
  • Qwen 2.5 VL 7B Instruct
  • InternVL3 8B
  • LLaVA 1.5 7B
  • GLM-4.1V 9B Thinking
  • GPT-4o
  • GPT-5

Discrete Token Subversion

Published Analyzed 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…

On the Adversarial Robustness of Discrete Image Tokenizers
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B

Targeted Bit-Flip Output Control

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

A targeted fault-injection vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed on hardware susceptible to Rowhammer memory attacks. An attacker with white-box access or co-located memory access can use the TFL (Targeted bit-Flip attack on LLM) framework to induce precise bit-flips (fewer than 50 bits) in the model's weights stored in DRAM. By utilizing a gradient-based search with a keyword-focused attack loss and an auxiliary utility score, the attacker can manipulate the model to…

TFL: Targeted Bit-Flip Attack on Large Language Model
Evaluated models: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B, Qwen 3 8B

Visual Memory Multi-Turn Manipulation

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to Visual Memory Injection (VMI), a stealthy targeted attack targeting multi-turn conversations. An attacker can embed an imperceptible adversarial perturbation ($L_\infty \le 8/255$) into a seemingly benign image. Because the visual input persists in the model's context throughout a multi-turn dialogue, the injected payload remains dormant. By utilizing "benign anchoring" and "context-cycling" during optimization, the attacker ensures the…

Visual Memory Injection Attacks for Multi-Turn Conversations
Evaluated models: Qwen 2.5 VL 7B Instruct, Qwen3-VL 8B Instruct, LLaVA-OneVision 1.5 8B Instruct+2 more
  • Qwen 2.5 VL 7B Instruct
  • Qwen3-VL 8B Instruct
  • LLaVA-OneVision 1.5 8B Instruct
  • Qwen-SEA-LION v4 8B VL
  • QoQ-Med3-VL 8B

Research methodology

Entries summarize publicly available primary-source security research. Model names reflect only systems explicitly evaluated by the cited paper, and measurements are research-reported unless independent verification is stated.

Discovery and publication are separate: new papers enter a candidate queue, then require human review and explicit approval before publication. Updates follow that review process, not a guaranteed daily publishing schedule. “Last analyzed” is the newest analysis date among published entries; it does not mean that all recent research has been covered.