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
arXiv:2606. 17020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remote sensing vision-language models have advanced Earth observation understanding, but most existing work remains centered on RGB imagery, leaving the complementary information in infrared data underexplored.
By Jiaju Han, Ben Zhang, Xuemeng Sun, Qike Zhang, Yuxian Dong, Chengyin Hu, Fengyu Zhang, Yiwei Wei, Jiujiang Guo
Remote sensing vision-language models have advanced Earth observation understanding, but most existing work remains centered on RGB imagery, leaving the complementary information in infrared data underexplored. Infrared images provide distinctive cues, including thermal intensity structures, object boundaries, and illumination-invariant scene features, which can enrich visual-language learning beyond conventional RGB observations.
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.
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
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.