Document Screenshot Retrievers are Vulnerable to Pixel Poisoning Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhuang, Shengyao, Khramtsova, Ekaterina, Ma, Xueguang, Koopman, Bevan, Lin, Jimmy, Zuccon, Guido
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhuang, Shengyao
Khramtsova, Ekaterina
Ma, Xueguang
Koopman, Bevan
Lin, Jimmy
Zuccon, Guido
author_facet Zhuang, Shengyao
Khramtsova, Ekaterina
Ma, Xueguang
Koopman, Bevan
Lin, Jimmy
Zuccon, Guido
contents Recent advancements in dense retrieval have introduced vision-language model (VLM)-based retrievers, such as DSE and ColPali, which leverage document screenshots embedded as vectors to enable effective search and offer a simplified pipeline over traditional text-only methods. In this study, we propose three pixel poisoning attack methods designed to compromise VLM-based retrievers and evaluate their effectiveness under various attack settings and parameter configurations. Our empirical results demonstrate that injecting even a single adversarial screenshot into the retrieval corpus can significantly disrupt search results, poisoning the top-10 retrieved documents for 41.9% of queries in the case of DSE and 26.4% for ColPali. These vulnerability rates notably exceed those observed with equivalent attacks on text-only retrievers. Moreover, when targeting a small set of known queries, the attack success rate raises, achieving complete success in certain cases. By exposing the vulnerabilities inherent in vision-language models, this work highlights the potential risks associated with their deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_16902
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Document Screenshot Retrievers are Vulnerable to Pixel Poisoning Attacks
Zhuang, Shengyao
Khramtsova, Ekaterina
Ma, Xueguang
Koopman, Bevan
Lin, Jimmy
Zuccon, Guido
Information Retrieval
Recent advancements in dense retrieval have introduced vision-language model (VLM)-based retrievers, such as DSE and ColPali, which leverage document screenshots embedded as vectors to enable effective search and offer a simplified pipeline over traditional text-only methods. In this study, we propose three pixel poisoning attack methods designed to compromise VLM-based retrievers and evaluate their effectiveness under various attack settings and parameter configurations. Our empirical results demonstrate that injecting even a single adversarial screenshot into the retrieval corpus can significantly disrupt search results, poisoning the top-10 retrieved documents for 41.9% of queries in the case of DSE and 26.4% for ColPali. These vulnerability rates notably exceed those observed with equivalent attacks on text-only retrievers. Moreover, when targeting a small set of known queries, the attack success rate raises, achieving complete success in certain cases. By exposing the vulnerabilities inherent in vision-language models, this work highlights the potential risks associated with their deployment.
title Document Screenshot Retrievers are Vulnerable to Pixel Poisoning Attacks
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16902