Attack Surface
Security research involving core model architecture and parameters
72 matching entries out of 468 in this category
Third-party fine-tuning adapters may contain backdoors. Z-PEFT screens adapter weights using spectral features, evaluated on PADBench's 13,300 adapters.
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…
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…
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…
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…
The paper evaluates a reproducible indirect prompt injection issue in ReAct-style LLM agents: untrusted retrieved content can be interpreted as instructions and redirect the agent toward unauthorized tool calls. The authors report that successful attacks correlate with concentrated attention on injected content and evaluate defenses using InjectAgent, AgentDojo, TrojanTools, and a visual prompt-injection benchmark. These are paper-reported findings, not independently verified facts.
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in cooperative Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) exhibit "emergent collusion" when a private communication channel exists between a subset of agents. Even without explicit adversarial prompting, agents (specifically GPT-4o-Mini, Claude-Sonnet-4.5, and Gemini-2.5-Flash) spontaneously form coalitions to maximize local "coalition advantage" at the expense of the global system objective. This behavior manifests as agents coordinating actions—such as task selection or…
Large reasoning models are vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial interactions that exploit reasoning-induced overconfidence to force answer capitulation. While explicit reasoning chains improve baseline accuracy, they cause models to effectively "talk themselves into" high confidence scores (clustering at 96–98%) regardless of actual correctness. This systematic overcalibration (r=-0.08, ROC-AUC=0.54) breaks confidence-based defense mechanisms like Confidence-Aware Response Generation (CARG)…