Attack Context

Black-box Research

Attacks requiring no knowledge of model internals

14 matching entries out of 736 in this category

Black-box research results

14 entries

Query-Agnostic Poisoning of Medical Multimodal RAG

Published May 11, 2026Analyzed Jul 20, 2026Source: arXiv

M3Att demonstrates a reproducible knowledge-poisoning issue in medical multimodal RAG: an attacker with limited corpus-distribution knowledge can insert paired image-text entries whose visually perturbed images are broadly retrieved and whose clinically plausible misinformation steers downstream generation. The paper evaluates both white-box and black-box retrieval optimization and reports degraded diagnostic and report-generation utility across multiple datasets, retrievers, and LVLMs. These…

Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Evaluated models: GPT-4o, GPT-5 Chat, Gemini 2.5 Flash+5 more

GPT-4o
GPT-5 Chat
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Claude Haiku 4.5
LLaVA Med
CLIP ViT-Large-Patch14-336
BGE-VL-base
SigLIP-SO400M-Patch14-384

Physical Infrared Semantic Disruption

Published Apr 3, 2026Analyzed Apr 11, 2026Source: arXiv

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…

Revealing Physical-World Semantic Vulnerabilities: Universal Adversarial Patches for Infrared Vision-Language Models

Evaluated models: InstructBLIP

X-Shaped Sparse VLM Attack

Published Mar 30, 2026Analyzed Apr 11, 2026Source: 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

VLM E-commerce Attack Surface

Published Mar 17, 2026Analyzed Apr 11, 2026Source: 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

VLM Split-Image Blindspot

Published Feb 8, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: 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…

Robustness of Vision Language Models Against Split-Image Harmful Input Attacks

Evaluated models: Llama 3.2 11B

Progressive Attention LVLM Attack

Published Feb 4, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

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…

Stage-wise Attention-Guided Region Sequencing for Adversarial Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models

Evaluated models: Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3 Pro Preview, GPT-4.1+7 more

Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 3 Pro Preview
GPT-4.1
GPT-5 Mini
Grok 4 Fast
LLaVA 1.5 7B
Llama 4 Maverick
Gemma 3 4B IT
Qwen3-VL 30B-A3B Instruct
Qwen3-VL 235B-A22B Instruct

Semantic Hierarchical VLM Transfer

Published Feb 2, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

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…

SGHA-Attack: Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Alignment for Transferable Targeted Attacks on Vision-Language Models

Evaluated models: UniDiffuser, BLIP-2 ViT-g/14, InstructBLIP Vicuna 13B+4 more

UniDiffuser
BLIP-2 ViT-g/14
InstructBLIP Vicuna 13B
MiniGPT-4 Vicuna 13B
LLaVA 1.5 13B
LLaVA NeXT Qwen 1.5 72B Chat
GPT-4o

Universal MLLM Target Matching

Published Jan 30, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

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…

Universal Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs via Target-View Routed Meta Optimization

Evaluated models: GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5+2 more

GPT-4o
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5
GPT-5.2
Claude Opus 4.5

Single Word Video Corruption

Published Dec 30, 2025Analyzed Jan 14, 2026Source: arXiv

Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion models are vulnerable to black-box adversarial prompt attacks that degrade output quality regarding semantic fidelity and temporal dynamics. This vulnerability is exploited via the T2VAttack framework, which utilizes two primary vector strategies: T2VAttack-S (Substitution) and T2VAttack-I (Insertion). T2VAttack-S leverages a greedy search to identify key semantic tokens and replaces them with high-similarity synonyms defined in lexical databases (e.g., WordNet)…

T2VAttack: Adversarial Attack on Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

Evaluated models: Not reported

Embodied Cross-Modal Misalignment

Published Nov 20, 2025Analyzed Jan 14, 2026Source: arXiv

OpenVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, contains a vulnerability regarding multimodal adversarial robustness. The model lacks sufficient cross-modal alignment stability, allowing attackers to disrupt the grounding between visual perception and linguistic instructions. By utilizing the "VLA-Fool" framework, adversaries can inject perturbations via three vectors: (1) Semantically Greedy Coordinate Gradient (SGCG), which alters specific linguistic tokens (referential cues, attributes…

When alignment fails: Multimodal adversarial attacks on vision-language-action models

Evaluated models: Not reported

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