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.
By Sizhe Chen, Yu-Lin Tsai, Ivan Evtimov, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Raluca Ada Popa, David Wagner, Arman Zharmagambetov
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.
By Joshua Penman
arXiv:2607. 25479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision--Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed through a model supply chain in which pretrained checkpoints, architecture definitions, text encoders, and exported computation graphs are distributed by third parties and reused across downstream services.
By Maria Rosaria Briglia, Igor Maljkovic, Antonio Emanuele Cin\`a, Luca Oneto, Iacopo Masi, Fabio Roli
arXiv:2610.09941v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, yet they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Defendi...
By Bojun Yang, Haochen Zhou, Zhifang Zhang, Haobo Wang, Songze Li, Lei Feng
Guardrail models, which screen malicious prompts in LLM services, often use lightweight Transformers with short context windows and bucketed positional encodings. The study identifies a new failure mode called Overflip, where repeating a prompt causes the guardrail’s prediction to flip from malicious to benign as the sequence length increases. Experiments on nine popular guardrails show that 5 models exhibit MAL→BEN flips on 100 prompts, with flip rates ranging from 8% to 92% and first flips occurring between 2.6k and 9.4k tokens, highlighting a gradual attention dispersion distinct from traditional attention‑dilution attacks.
By Xu He, Chih-Hsuan Lin, Hung-Mao Chen, Junjie Xiong, Yan Zhai, Kun Sun
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....
By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy