Phantasia: Context-Adaptive Backdoors in Vision Language Models
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have greatly enhanced the integration of visual perception and linguistic reasoning, driving rapid progress in multimodal understanding. Despite these achievements, the security of VLMs, particularly their vulnerability to backdoor attacks, remains significantly underexplored. Existing backdoor attacks on VLMs are still in an early stage of development, with most current methods relying on generating poisoned responses that contain fixed, easily identifiable patterns. In this work, we make two key contributions. First, we demonstrate for the first time that the stealthiness of existing VLM backdoor attacks has been substantially overestimated. By adapting defense techniques originally designed for other domains (e.g., vision-only and text-only models), we show that several state-of-the-art attacks can be detected with surprising ease. Second, to address this gap, we introduce Phantasia, a context-adaptive backdoor attack that dynamically aligns its poisoned outputs with the semantics of each input. Instead of producing static poisoned patterns, Phantasia encourages models to generate contextually coherent yet malicious responses that remain plausible, thereby significantly improving stealth and adaptability. Extensive experiments across diverse VLM architectures reveal that Phantasia achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates while maintaining benign performance under various defensive settings.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Obliviate: Neutralizing Task-agnostic Backdoors within the Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning Paradigm
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a key training strategy for large language models. However, its reliance on fewer trainable parameters poses security risks, such as task-agnostic backdoors. Despite thei…
backdoor defenseparameter-efficient fine-tuningArchitectural Neural Backdoors from First Principles
While previous research backdoored neural networks by changing their parameters, recent work uncovered a more insidious threat: backdoors embedded within the definition of the network's architecture. This involves inject…
Imagery agnosia and its phenomenology
Lack of vivid sensory imagery has recently become an active subject of research, under the name of aphantasia. Extremely vivid imagery, or hyperphantasia, is at the other end of the spectrum of individual differences. Wh…
Artificial Phantasia: Emergent Mental Imagery in Large Language Models
Can visual imagery be driven solely by language? This idea goes against cognitive science's traditional view that visual mental imagery is only possible through pictorial representations. Large Language Models (LLMs) pro…
Inject Once Survive Later: Backdooring Vision-Language-Action Models to Persist Through Downstream Fine-tuning
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become foundational to modern embodied AI systems. By integrating visual perception, language understanding, and action planning, they enable general-purpose task execution across…