Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed on infrared (IR) remote sensing imagery in security-critical settings, yet their adversarial robustness remains unexamined. We present AirflowAttack, to our knowledge the first adversarial attack for IR remote-sensing VLMs and the first to weaponize thermal-airflow turbulence as the perturbation prior.
InfraPatch is a white‑box, per‑instance framework that generates small grayscale patches to target infrared‑adapted vision‑language models (IR‑VLMs). The method optimizes a single‑channel patch within a 5% local‑area budget, using proxy‑guided placement and task‑adaptive objectives to induce desired behaviors in image classification, captioning, and binary visual question answering. Across ten IR‑VLM variants tested on synthetic infrared images, InfraPatch achieves targeted attack success rates ranging from 86% to 100%, revealing significant vulnerability differences among architectures and tasks.
By Chengyin Hu, Dingyi Lu, Jiaju Han, Xiang Chen, Weiwen Shi, Jiahuan Long, Yiwei Wei, Jiujiang Guo
The paper explores a synthetic-first training approach for detecting drones in medium- and long-wave infrared imagery, combining synthetic scene generation with fine-tuning on real data. It demonstrates that synthetic data can establish initial object representations, but real infrared data is crucial to close domain gaps and improve reliability. The study finds that aligning datasets has a greater impact on performance than increasing model size, and that semantic alignment in feature space is the strongest predictor of success, with radiometric factors like entropy and dynamic range also contributing.
By Tanel Liiv, Sander Soodla, Nzamba Bignoumba, Alma M. Liezenga, Toomas Pruuden
The paper explores using generative models to translate RGB UAV images into synthetic infrared (IR) images for training vehicle detectors in domains where real IR data is scarce. Various translators—supervised GANs, ControlNet-based diffusion models, and LoRA-ed foundation models—were trained on paired RGB-IR datasets and applied to unseen target datasets to generate synthetic IR data. The synthetic IR images, especially those produced by Stable Diffusion 3.5 with ControlNet, significantly improved detection performance on unseen IR test sets, outperforming RGB and grayscale baselines and narrowing the gap to real IR data.
By Thijs A. Eker, Ella P. Fokkinga, Jan Erik van Woerden, Elfi I. S. Hofmeijer, Sebastiaan P. Snel, Klamer Schutte, Friso G. Heslinga
arXiv:2607. 29445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infrared vision-language models (IR-VLMs) extend thermal perception to open-vocabulary classification, image captioning, and visual question answering.
By Xiang Chen, Yingying Zhao, Chao Li, Jiaju Han, Ben Zhang, Ang Li, Jiahuan Long, Yiwei Wei, Jiujiang Guo, Chengyin Hu
arXiv:2609.18133v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Visible-infrared object detectors are used for robust perception under challenging illumination and weather conditions. Current physical attacks apply...
By Yueqi Zhu, Qi Ming, Guo Cheng, Yongkang Zhang, Feiran Liu, Juan Fang, Jiahuan Zhou, Jiangmeng Li, Yuhan Zhang
arXiv:2607. 26651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the promising performance of deep neural networks on image-based tasks, different real-world applications such as autonomous driving and motion detection have become increasingly mature and relevant to human lives.
By Shen You, Wei Jiang, Jiarui Liu, Yijian Ye, Qiuzhen Lin, Xiangtao Li, Ka-Chun Wong
arXiv:2512. 21815v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve remarkable performance but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
By Mengqi He, Xinyu Tian, Xin Shen, Jinhong Ni, Shu Zou, Zhaoyuan Yang, Jing Zhang
The paper investigates how Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be fooled by small, human‑imperceptible changes to images. It introduces a gradient‑based attack that targets only the vision encoder, reducing computational cost while still effectively disrupting both untargeted and targeted multimodal alignment. Experiments on open‑source VLMs such as Qwen2.5‑VL, Granite‑Vision, FastVLM, and Phi‑3.5‑Vision demonstrate that these perturbations can significantly alter the models’ textual outputs.
By Ilan Zini, Boussad Addad, Katarzyna Kapusta
arXiv:2608.30839v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Thermal Infrared detection is widely used in autonomous driving, medical AI, etc., but its security has only attracted attention recently. We propose i...
By Xiaopei Zhu, Siyuan Huang, Zhanhao Hu, Jianmin Li, Jun Zhu, Xiaolin Hu
The paper investigates using Vision Language Models (VLMs) to accelerate verification and validation (V&V) of classification models by automatically detecting systematic errors. It introduces a VLM-based error slice detection (ESD) method that groups and labels errors, demonstrating its ability to identify perturbations in a non-military dataset and to cluster images by surroundings in a military context. The study highlights challenges such as underrepresentation of defence data in VLM training and limited contextual diversity, and suggests that while fully automated V&V is not yet feasible, VLMs could speed up the process in the future.
By Dieuwertje Alblas, Alma M. Liezenga, Jan Erik van Woerden, Fedor Taggenbrock, Dalia Aljawaheri, Klamer Schutte
arXiv:2609.05889v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Resource-exhaustion attacks against autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) typically assume unimodal threat models, treating the image branch as...
By Zhaoxiong Ni, Yatie Xiao, Chi-Man Pun, Fei Peng, Qingxiao Guan, Keke Tang