Multi-Turn Adaptive Prompting Attack on Large Vision-Language Models
In Chong Choi, Jiacheng Zhang, Feng Liu et al. · The University of Melbourne · The University of Adelaide
In Chong Choi, Jiacheng Zhang, Feng Liu et al. · The University of Melbourne · The University of Adelaide
Multi-turn jailbreak attack on VLMs that adaptively alternates text and image inputs to bypass safety alignment
Multi-turn jailbreak attacks are effective against text-only large language models (LLMs) by gradually introducing malicious content across turns. When extended to large vision-language models (LVLMs), we find that naively adding visual inputs can cause existing multi-turn jailbreaks to be easily defended. For example, overly malicious visual input will easily trigger the defense mechanism of safety-aligned LVLMs, making the response more conservative. To address this, we propose MAPA: a multi-turn adaptive prompting attack that 1) at each turn, alternates text-vision attack actions to elicit the most malicious response; and 2) across turns, adjusts the attack trajectory through iterative back-and-forth refinement to gradually amplify response maliciousness. This two-level design enables MAPA to consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods, improving attack success rates by 11-35% on recent benchmarks against LLaVA-V1.6-Mistral-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.2-Vision-11B-Instruct and GPT-4o-mini.
Ruize Gao, Kaiwen Zhou, Yongqiang Chen et al. · National University of Singapore · Knowin AI +2 more
Adversarial perturbations fool membership inference attacks by fabricating fake members; proposes gradient-based detection and robust inference defenses
Membership inference attacks (MIAs) aim to determine whether a specific data point was part of a model's training set, serving as effective tools for evaluating privacy leakage of vision models. However, existing MIAs implicitly assume honest query inputs, and their adversarial robustness remains unexplored. We show that MIAs for vision models expose a previously overlooked adversarial surface: adversarial membership manipulation, where imperceptible perturbations can reliably push non-member images into the "member" region of state-of-the-art MIAs. In this paper, we provide the first unified perspective on this phenomenon by analyzing its mechanism and implications. We begin by demonstrating that adversarial membership fabrication is consistently effective across diverse architectures and datasets. We then reveal a distinctive geometric signature - a characteristic gradient-norm collapse trajectory - that reliably separates fabricated from true members despite their nearly identical semantic representations. Building on this insight, we introduce a principled detection strategy grounded in gradient-geometry signals and develop a robust inference framework that substantially mitigates adversarial manipulation. Extensive experiments show that fabrication is broadly effective, while our detection and robust inference strategies significantly enhance resilience. This work establishes the first comprehensive framework for adversarial membership manipulation in vision models.
Jiacheng Zhang, Jinhao Li, Hanxun Huang et al. · The University of Melbourne
Defends CLIP zero-shot classifiers via adversarial fine-tuning with semantically richer adversarial examples from LLM-generated description ensembles
Recent studies have shown that CLIP model's adversarial robustness in zero-shot classification tasks can be enhanced by adversarially fine-tuning its image encoder with adversarial examples (AEs), which are generated by minimizing the cosine similarity between images and a hand-crafted template (e.g., ''A photo of a {label}''). However, it has been shown that the cosine similarity between a single image and a single hand-crafted template is insufficient to measure the similarity for image-text pairs. Building on this, in this paper, we find that the AEs generated using cosine similarity may fail to fool CLIP when the similarity metric is replaced with semantically enriched alternatives, making the image encoder fine-tuned with these AEs less robust. To overcome this issue, we first propose a semantic-ensemble attack to generate semantic-aware AEs by minimizing the average similarity between the original image and an ensemble of refined textual descriptions. These descriptions are initially generated by a foundation model to capture core semantic features beyond hand-crafted templates and are then refined to reduce hallucinations. To this end, we propose Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-Tuning (SAFT), which fine-tunes CLIP's image encoder with semantic-aware AEs. Extensive experiments show that SAFT outperforms current methods, achieving substantial improvements in zero-shot adversarial robustness across 16 datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/SAFT.