arXiv Machine Learning

State Backdoor: Towards Stealthy Real-world Poisoning Attack on Vision-Language-Action Model in State Space

arXiv:2601. 04266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are widely deployed in safety-critical embodied AI applications such as robotics.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14

Adjustable Text-Guided Backdoor Attacks with Natural-Word Triggers on Multimodal Pretrained Models

arXiv:2604. 05809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents Text-Guided Backdoor (TGB), an adjustable backdoor attack against multimodal pretrained models that uses natural-word triggers, namely words that can naturally occur in ordinary textual inputs.

By Yiyang Zhang, Chaojian Yu, Ziming Hong, Yuanjie Shao, Qinmu Peng, Tongliang Liu, Xinge You
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

TrapVLA: Trapping Vision-Language-Action Models in Configured Failure Modes

The paper introduces Configured Failure Trapping, a new backdoor attack targeting Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that activates through subtle textual triggers and forces the robot to fail in a specific, controlled manner. It presents a data engine for generating high‑quality target trajectories, an automated evaluation suite, and two benchmarks—Trap‑LIBERO and Trap‑RoboTwin—covering four failure modes. The authors propose TrapVLA, a method that learns trigger‑induced action residuals to steer policies toward the desired failure behavior, demonstrating effectiveness in both simulation and real‑world robotic experiments while maintaining performance on clean data.

By Jun-Hui Liu, Kun-Yu Lin, Yi-Lin Wei, Xu-Han Chen, Yinghao Li, Zhuohao Li, Yuan-Ming Li, Qing Zhang, Xiaoyi Fan, Dongmei Jiang, Yan Li, Wei-Shi Zheng
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.