Repeat-After-Me is a black-box adaptive visual prompt injection technique that can reveal personally identifiable information or trigger malicious tool calls in both open-weight and commercial vision‑language models, achieving attack success rates above 80% on Qwen3.6‑27B and 47% on GPT‑5.5. The method works even when the benign user prompt is unrelated to the injected task and does not explicitly authorize it, and it retains significant effectiveness when transferred across models or optimized on surrogate systems. In a real‑world OpenClaw Discord deployment, a minimally injected image can overwrite TOOLS.md, enabling remote code execution and secret exfiltration.
arXiv:2608.30207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computer use agents (CUAs) are vision-language models that perceive a screen and act on a real operating system through mouse, keyboard, and terminal...
Computer use agents (CUAs) are vision-language models that perceive a screen and act on a real operating system through mouse, keyboard, and terminal, and they are increasingly deployed to automate ev...
arXiv:2602. 09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf.
INFUSE is a new benchmark that tests indirect prompt injection (IPI) in large‑language‑model agents performing long‑horizon workflows. It contains 40 realistic tasks and 56 attack scenarios across five threat categories, with attacks injected through realistic interaction surfaces rather than just initial prompts. The study evaluated 19 LLMs, generating over 41,000 adversarial trajectories and found mean attack success rates of 19.6% (LLM evaluation) and 15.4% (heuristic verification), while prompt‑level hardening reduced success from 58.2% to 14.3%.
arXiv:2605. 17986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly deployed in local workflows with access to external tools.
The paper proposes universal, tool‑based defenses for large language model agents that use external tools, addressing four types of adversarial attacks: direct and indirect prompt injection, memory poisoning, and backdoor attacks. Two main defenses are introduced: Attacker Tool Filtering, which uses anomaly detection to remove suspicious tools, and Normal Tool Recalling, which restores the agent’s original toolset before planning. The authors also add prompt‑based defenses such as Chain‑of‑Thought prompting and self‑reflection, and demonstrate that these methods dramatically lower attack success rates—often to 0%—across multiple open‑source and proprietary LLMs while maintaining or improving task performance.
arXiv:2608. 05430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The remarkable instruction-following ability of modern LLMs has enabled their practical use as the minds of agents that can autonomously complete increasingly complex tasks.
arXiv:2606. 13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences.
The paper introduces Semantic Overlays, a steering technique that adds non‑textual annotations to a language model’s input by applying learned adapters at specific prefill positions. These overlays create an out‑of‑band channel that encodes span identity and complex semantics, enabling the model to interpret marked text differently—such as rewriting code in a specified language or ignoring executable instructions. Experiments show that Semantic Overlays dramatically reduce prompt‑injection success rates while preserving model utility and readability of marked spans.
arXiv:2609.31558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has emerged as a dominant vision backbone due to its strong transferability and zero-shot capabilities....
ShadowFPT is a targeted backdoor attack on Federated Prompt Tuning (FPT) that exploits the frozen backbone of large vision–language models. The attack pretrains a learnable Shadow Trigger to steer representations toward a target class, then adapts the trigger and local prompt during federated training while only uploading prompt updates. This method raises the attack success rate from 19.81% to 90.36% across various datasets and settings, yet preserves clean accuracy and remains effective for textual, visual, and joint prompt tuning.
arXiv:2607. 05120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents act on behalf of user prompts, consuming external data and taking actions based on the agent context.