arXiv Computer Vision

FusionAudit: Pathway-Conditioned Robustness Auditing for Native Multimodal Models

FusionAudit introduces PaRMA, a pathway-conditioned robustness auditing framework for native multimodal vision‑language models. It evaluates two image‑level interventions—pixel perturbation and rendered‑text insertion—to expose architecture‑specific blind spots. The study applies diagnostic‑motivated attacks (MANTIS and Nat‑Evid) to 18 open‑weight VLMs, revealing that legacy single‑attack rankings are unstable and that PaRMA uncovers higher residual risk than standard benchmarks.

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 AI
Oct 5

Corrupted but Correct: Why Vision-Language Models Lie to Themselves Internally

The paper demonstrates that a targeted adversarial perturbation can reduce a vision‑language model’s training loss to near zero for a fixed target caption, yet the same model, when generating freely, still produces the correct description. This phenomenon, termed the train/inference gap, is traced to a single autoregressive step where the target token’s rank is fixed across all images, and further analysis shows that the language decoder, rather than the visual encoder, determines whether the corrupted signal is amplified or suppressed. The study uses a controlled two‑stage PGD attack on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and evaluates the effect on 200 held‑out COCO images, revealing that adversarial robustness in autoregressive VLMs largely depends on the language decoder’s prior. whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that defenses and faithfulness evaluations for deployed vision‑language models should focus on the language decoder rather than the visual encoder, as the former is the key determinant of robustness to adversarial perturbations."

By Arun Josephraj Arokiaraj, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

DecisionRobust: Benchmarking Robustness for JEV Style Decision Models Across Text and Vision

DecisionRobust is a new benchmark that evaluates the robustness of JEV-style decision models to adversarial attacks across both text and vision inputs. It includes a variety of attack types—semantic text perturbations, image perturbations, and prompt injections—and uses external validity checks and cross-model candidate selection to curate evaluation sets. Experiments on 30 text and 17 vision model configurations reveal that vulnerabilities can transfer across models, robustness varies by task and attack, and label-consistency checks significantly reduce apparent attack success.

By Yifan Lan, Zhongye Liu, Yurui Chang, Hanyu Wang, Yongkang Du, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen