Chain of Attack: On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models Against Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Peng, Bie, Yequan, Mao, Jianda, Song, Yangqiu, Wang, Yang, Chen, Hao, Chen, Kani
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xie, Peng
Bie, Yequan
Mao, Jianda
Song, Yangqiu
Wang, Yang
Chen, Hao
Chen, Kani
author_facet Xie, Peng
Bie, Yequan
Mao, Jianda
Song, Yangqiu
Wang, Yang
Chen, Hao
Chen, Kani
contents Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have showcased remarkable performance in image and natural language understanding, such as image captioning and response generation. As the practical applications of vision-language models become increasingly widespread, their potential safety and robustness issues raise concerns that adversaries may evade the system and cause these models to generate toxic content through malicious attacks. Therefore, evaluating the robustness of open-source VLMs against adversarial attacks has garnered growing attention, with transfer-based attacks as a representative black-box attacking strategy. However, most existing transfer-based attacks neglect the importance of the semantic correlations between vision and text modalities, leading to sub-optimal adversarial example generation and attack performance. To address this issue, we present Chain of Attack (CoA), which iteratively enhances the generation of adversarial examples based on the multi-modal semantic update using a series of intermediate attacking steps, achieving superior adversarial transferability and efficiency. A unified attack success rate computing method is further proposed for automatic evasion evaluation. Extensive experiments conducted under the most realistic and high-stakes scenario, demonstrate that our attacking strategy can effectively mislead models to generate targeted responses using only black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim models. The comprehensive robustness evaluation in our paper provides insight into the vulnerabilities of VLMs and offers a reference for the safety considerations of future model developments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_15720
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chain of Attack: On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models Against Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks
Xie, Peng
Bie, Yequan
Mao, Jianda
Song, Yangqiu
Wang, Yang
Chen, Hao
Chen, Kani
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have showcased remarkable performance in image and natural language understanding, such as image captioning and response generation. As the practical applications of vision-language models become increasingly widespread, their potential safety and robustness issues raise concerns that adversaries may evade the system and cause these models to generate toxic content through malicious attacks. Therefore, evaluating the robustness of open-source VLMs against adversarial attacks has garnered growing attention, with transfer-based attacks as a representative black-box attacking strategy. However, most existing transfer-based attacks neglect the importance of the semantic correlations between vision and text modalities, leading to sub-optimal adversarial example generation and attack performance. To address this issue, we present Chain of Attack (CoA), which iteratively enhances the generation of adversarial examples based on the multi-modal semantic update using a series of intermediate attacking steps, achieving superior adversarial transferability and efficiency. A unified attack success rate computing method is further proposed for automatic evasion evaluation. Extensive experiments conducted under the most realistic and high-stakes scenario, demonstrate that our attacking strategy can effectively mislead models to generate targeted responses using only black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim models. The comprehensive robustness evaluation in our paper provides insight into the vulnerabilities of VLMs and offers a reference for the safety considerations of future model developments.
title Chain of Attack: On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models Against Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15720