From Pretrain to Pain: Adversarial Vulnerability of Video Foundation Models Without Task Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu, Hui, Yu, Yi, Xia, Song, Yang, Yiming, Rajan, Deepu, Ng, Boon Poh, Kot, Alex, Jiang, Xudong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917070849966080
author Lu, Hui
Yu, Yi
Xia, Song
Yang, Yiming
Rajan, Deepu
Ng, Boon Poh
Kot, Alex
Jiang, Xudong
author_facet Lu, Hui
Yu, Yi
Xia, Song
Yang, Yiming
Rajan, Deepu
Ng, Boon Poh
Kot, Alex
Jiang, Xudong
contents Large-scale Video Foundation Models (VFMs) has significantly advanced various video-related tasks, either through task-specific models or Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the open accessibility of VFMs also introduces critical security risks, as adversaries can exploit full knowledge of the VFMs to launch potent attacks. This paper investigates a novel and practical adversarial threat scenario: attacking downstream models or MLLMs fine-tuned from open-source VFMs, without requiring access to the victim task, training data, model query, and architecture. In contrast to conventional transfer-based attacks that rely on task-aligned surrogate models, we demonstrate that adversarial vulnerabilities can be exploited directly from the VFMs. To this end, we propose the Transferable Video Attack (TVA), a temporal-aware adversarial attack method that leverages the temporal representation dynamics of VFMs to craft effective perturbations. TVA integrates a bidirectional contrastive learning mechanism to maximize the discrepancy between the clean and adversarial features, and introduces a temporal consistency loss that exploits motion cues to enhance the sequential impact of perturbations. TVA avoids the need to train expensive surrogate models or access to domain-specific data, thereby offering a more practical and efficient attack strategy. Extensive experiments across 24 video-related tasks demonstrate the efficacy of TVA against downstream models and MLLMs, revealing a previously underexplored security vulnerability in the deployment of video models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Pretrain to Pain: Adversarial Vulnerability of Video Foundation Models Without Task Knowledge
Lu, Hui
Yu, Yi
Xia, Song
Yang, Yiming
Rajan, Deepu
Ng, Boon Poh
Kot, Alex
Jiang, Xudong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Large-scale Video Foundation Models (VFMs) has significantly advanced various video-related tasks, either through task-specific models or Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the open accessibility of VFMs also introduces critical security risks, as adversaries can exploit full knowledge of the VFMs to launch potent attacks. This paper investigates a novel and practical adversarial threat scenario: attacking downstream models or MLLMs fine-tuned from open-source VFMs, without requiring access to the victim task, training data, model query, and architecture. In contrast to conventional transfer-based attacks that rely on task-aligned surrogate models, we demonstrate that adversarial vulnerabilities can be exploited directly from the VFMs. To this end, we propose the Transferable Video Attack (TVA), a temporal-aware adversarial attack method that leverages the temporal representation dynamics of VFMs to craft effective perturbations. TVA integrates a bidirectional contrastive learning mechanism to maximize the discrepancy between the clean and adversarial features, and introduces a temporal consistency loss that exploits motion cues to enhance the sequential impact of perturbations. TVA avoids the need to train expensive surrogate models or access to domain-specific data, thereby offering a more practical and efficient attack strategy. Extensive experiments across 24 video-related tasks demonstrate the efficacy of TVA against downstream models and MLLMs, revealing a previously underexplored security vulnerability in the deployment of video models.
title From Pretrain to Pain: Adversarial Vulnerability of Video Foundation Models Without Task Knowledge
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07049