arXiv Machine Learning

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Diffusion-based Mitigation of Geolocation Privacy Leakage in Vision-Language Models

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

DEFUSE: Generalizable Backdoor Defense for Self-Supervised Encoders with Generative Priors

DEFUSE is a backdoor detection framework for self‑supervised encoders that uses a conditional diffusion generative model to estimate representation‑conditioned image likelihoods. By fine‑tuning a pretrained diffusion model, DEFUSE performs semantic reconstruction in a reference encoder’s representation space, enabling it to detect backdoors without needing uninfected data or precomputed pseudo‑labels. Experiments show that DEFUSE outperforms existing detectors on both visual SSL and vision‑language encoders, reducing reliance on prior knowledge of the victim model or attack strategy.

By Tuo Chen, Jie Gui, Minjing Dong, Lanting Fang, Ju Jia, Benlei Cui, Jian Liu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Breaking the weakest link to evade vision language models

The paper investigates how Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be fooled by tiny, 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 interpretations. Experiments on open‑source VLMs such as Qwen2.5‑VL, Granite‑Vision, FastVLM, and Phi‑3.5‑Vision demonstrate that these small perturbations can dramatically alter the models’ textual outputs.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Breaking the weakest link to evade vision language models

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 Computer Vision
Aug 28

TempJail: Temporal Jailbreak Attacks against Image-to-Video Generation Models

The paper introduces TempJail, a temporal jailbreak framework targeting image‑to‑video generation models. It exploits a newly identified vulnerability where unsafe semantics arise from the composition of frames over time, rather than from single‑frame violations. By decomposing malicious captions into visual conditions and temporal instructions, and by employing controlled latent perturbations and template rewriting, TempJail achieves a 23.3 % higher attack success rate than prior methods on several commercial models.

By Qi Lu, Zehui Guo, David Yuanda Gan, Zijing Li, Hengda Zhang, Weijun Xu, Qiankun Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models in Zero-shot Privacy Classification

The paper investigates whether large, instruction‑following Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) can reliably perform zero‑shot image privacy classification. It compares three open‑source VLMs to specialized privacy models on two public benchmarks, evaluating accuracy, robustness to image degradations (compression, lighting changes, noise), inference speed, and parameter count. The findings show that while VLMs remain robust to perturbations, they are less accurate and significantly slower than smaller, purpose‑built privacy models, indicating that scaling alone does not guarantee effective privacy classification.

By Alina Elena Baia, Alessio Xompero, Andrea Cavallaro