DualTAP: A Dual-Task Adversarial Protector for Mobile MLLM Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Fuyao, Zhang, Jiaming, Wang, Che, Sun, Xiongtao, Hao, Yurong, Guan, Guowei, Li, Wenjie, Huang, Longtao, Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Fuyao
Zhang, Jiaming
Wang, Che
Sun, Xiongtao
Hao, Yurong
Guan, Guowei
Li, Wenjie
Huang, Longtao
Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
author_facet Zhang, Fuyao
Zhang, Jiaming
Wang, Che
Sun, Xiongtao
Hao, Yurong
Guan, Guowei
Li, Wenjie
Huang, Longtao
Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
contents The reliance of mobile GUI agents on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduces a severe privacy vulnerability: screenshots containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are often sent to untrusted, third-party routers. These routers can exploit their own MLLMs to mine this data, violating user privacy. Existing privacy perturbations fail the critical dual challenge of this scenario: protecting PII from the router's MLLM while simultaneously preserving task utility for the agent's MLLM. To address this gap, we propose the Dual-Task Adversarial Protector (DualTAP), a novel framework that, for the first time, explicitly decouples these conflicting objectives. DualTAP trains a lightweight generator using two key innovations: (i) a contrastive attention module that precisely identifies and targets only the PII-sensitive regions, and (ii) a dual-task adversarial objective that simultaneously minimizes a task-preservation loss (to maintain agent utility) and a privacy-interference loss (to suppress PII leakage). To facilitate this study, we introduce PrivScreen, a new dataset of annotated mobile screenshots designed specifically for this dual-task evaluation. Comprehensive experiments on six diverse MLLMs (e.g., GPT-5) demonstrate DualTAP's state-of-the-art protection. It reduces the average privacy leakage rate by 31.6 percentage points (a 3.0x relative improvement) while, critically, maintaining an 80.8% task success rate - a negligible drop from the 83.6% unprotected baseline. DualTAP presents the first viable solution to the privacy-utility trade-off in mobile MLLM agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_13248
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DualTAP: A Dual-Task Adversarial Protector for Mobile MLLM Agents
Zhang, Fuyao
Zhang, Jiaming
Wang, Che
Sun, Xiongtao
Hao, Yurong
Guan, Guowei
Li, Wenjie
Huang, Longtao
Lim, Wei Yang Bryan
Cryptography and Security
The reliance of mobile GUI agents on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduces a severe privacy vulnerability: screenshots containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are often sent to untrusted, third-party routers. These routers can exploit their own MLLMs to mine this data, violating user privacy. Existing privacy perturbations fail the critical dual challenge of this scenario: protecting PII from the router's MLLM while simultaneously preserving task utility for the agent's MLLM. To address this gap, we propose the Dual-Task Adversarial Protector (DualTAP), a novel framework that, for the first time, explicitly decouples these conflicting objectives. DualTAP trains a lightweight generator using two key innovations: (i) a contrastive attention module that precisely identifies and targets only the PII-sensitive regions, and (ii) a dual-task adversarial objective that simultaneously minimizes a task-preservation loss (to maintain agent utility) and a privacy-interference loss (to suppress PII leakage). To facilitate this study, we introduce PrivScreen, a new dataset of annotated mobile screenshots designed specifically for this dual-task evaluation. Comprehensive experiments on six diverse MLLMs (e.g., GPT-5) demonstrate DualTAP's state-of-the-art protection. It reduces the average privacy leakage rate by 31.6 percentage points (a 3.0x relative improvement) while, critically, maintaining an 80.8% task success rate - a negligible drop from the 83.6% unprotected baseline. DualTAP presents the first viable solution to the privacy-utility trade-off in mobile MLLM agents.
title DualTAP: A Dual-Task Adversarial Protector for Mobile MLLM Agents
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13248