Vision Vulnerabilities

The paper describes a reproducible black-box multimodal jailbreak evaluation, INFER/INFER+, in which dense image typography, nested cross-modal references, recursive visual layouts, and entropy-guided search increase processing complexity and weaken refusal behavior in large vision-language models. The authors report average ASRs of 88.6% on open-source models and 84.0% on commercial models; these are paper-reported measurements, not independently verified facts. For safe defensive…

MLingualFC is a reproducible black-box safety evaluation showing that harmful instructions rendered as multilingual flowchart images can bypass vision-language model safeguards more often than equivalent text-only inputs. The paper evaluates horizontal, vertical, and tortuous layouts across English, Hindi, Punjabi, Spanish, Romanian, and German. Reported results vary substantially by language, script, layout, and model; these are paper-reported measurements, not independently verified…

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…

The paper reports a reproducible black-box evaluation showing that vision-language models can recover prohibited intent encoded or implied through ostensibly benign visual inputs. Four tested families—visual ciphers, object replacement, text replacement, and analogy riddles—expose a cross-modality alignment gap: safeguards effective for explicit text may not reliably apply after harmful semantics are reconstructed from images. These are paper-reported results, not independently verified…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models suffer from a severe linguistic fragility vulnerability where semantically equivalent but structurally complex adversarial instructions cause catastrophic failures in visual grounding and geometric reasoning. Attackers can reliably induce physical execution failures in robotic manipulation tasks by applying semantic-preserving linguistic variations, such as synonymous rephrasing, syntactic restructuring, or the addition of fine-grained compositional…

Memory-augmented LLM web agents utilizing raw trajectory memory are vulnerable to Environment-injected Trajectory-based Agent Memory Poisoning (eTAMP). Attackers can embed malicious instructions within user-generated web content (e.g., product pages, forum posts). When the agent processes this content during a routine task, the instructions are passively ingested into its raw trajectory memory. During subsequent, entirely separate tasks on different websites, semantic retrieval mechanisms pull…

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…

Multiple Text-to-Image (T2I) generation systems and their associated multi-stage moderation pipelines are vulnerable to low-effort semantic obfuscation attacks. Attackers can systematically bypass Input Compliance Checks (ICC), Semantic Safety Checks (SSC), and Post-Generation Moderation (PGM) by embedding restricted concepts into benign natural language contexts. By utilizing techniques such as Material Substitution, Artistic Reframing, Pseudo-Educational Framing, and Ambiguous Action…

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…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are vulnerable to targeted, low-budget textual perturbations in their natural-language instruction inputs, which can maliciously alter sequential decision-making and downstream physical robotic behavior. Because VLA policies tightly couple language, perception, and control, bounded edits—such as character-level typos, token attribute swaps, or prompt-level uncertainty clauses—propagate through the model's execution trajectory. This allows a black-box…