Attention! Your Vision Language Model Could Be Maliciously Manipulated

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in understanding complex real-world scenarios and supporting data-driven decision-making processes. However, VLMs exhibit significant vulnerability against adversarial examples, either text or image, which can lead to various adversarial outcomes, e.g., jailbreaking, hijacking, and hallucination, etc. In this work, we empirically and theoretically demonstrate that VLMs are particularly susceptible to image-based adversarial examples, where imperceptible perturbations can precisely manipulate each output token. To this end, we propose a novel attack called Vision-language model Manipulation Attack (VMA), which integrates first-order and second-order momentum optimization techniques with a differentiable transformation mechanism to effectively optimize the adversarial perturbation.