Architecture Components

Embedding Research

Security concerns in embedding models and vectors

21 matching entries out of 71 in this category

Embedding research results

21 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

Retrieval Memory Injection

Published Feb 17, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

A vulnerability exists in the similarity-based retrieval mechanisms of long-term memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically affecting systems like Mem0 and A-mem. The vulnerability arises from the system's reliance on dense embedding similarity (e.g., cosine similarity) to retrieve context from dynamic, user-generated memory banks without sufficient semantic validation or conflict resolution. An unprivileged remote attacker can exploit this by injecting "adversarial…

ER-MIA: Black-Box Adversarial Memory Injection Attacks on Long-Term Memory-Augmented Large Language Models

Evaluated models: GPT-oss 20B, Llama 3.2 3B, Gemma 3 27B

Context-Robust RAG Poisoning

Published Feb 6, 2026Analyzed Feb 22, 2026Source: arXiv

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to a robust corpus poisoning attack known as "Confundo." This vulnerability arises from the lack of pipeline awareness in standard RAG implementations, specifically regarding document ingestion (tokenization and chunking) and query variations. An attacker can exploit this by fine-tuning a Large Language Model (LLM) to function as a poison generator. Unlike traditional adversarial examples which are brittle, Confundo generates poison…

Confundo: Learning to Generate Robust Poison for Practical RAG Systems

Evaluated models: Llama 3 8B, Gemini Pro

Unified Robustness Gap

Published Jan 31, 2026Analyzed Mar 9, 2026Source: arXiv

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…

Unifying Adversarial Robustness and Training Across Text Scoring Models

Evaluated models: E5 BERT-base, Qwen 3 0.6B, Llama 3.2 3B Instruct+2 more

E5 BERT-base
Qwen 3 0.6B
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Skywork Reward V2

Query-Agnostic Retrieval Poisoning

Published Jan 30, 2026Analyzed Mar 8, 2026Source: arXiv

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)…

" Someone Hid It": Query-Agnostic Black-Box Attacks on LLM-Based Retrieval

Evaluated models: Mistral 7B, Qwen 2.5 7B

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

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