Physical Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ling, Chen, Hu, Kai, Liu, Hangcheng, Han, Xingshuo, Zhang, Tianwei, Ou, Changhai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911396345675776
author Ling, Chen
Hu, Kai
Liu, Hangcheng
Han, Xingshuo
Zhang, Tianwei
Ou, Changhai
author_facet Ling, Chen
Hu, Kai
Liu, Hangcheng
Han, Xingshuo
Zhang, Tianwei
Ou, Changhai
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world intelligent systems for perception and reasoning in open physical environments. While LVLMs are known to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, existing methods either require access to input channels or depend on knowledge of user queries, assumptions that rarely hold in practical deployments. We propose the first Physical Prompt Injection Attack (PPIA), a black-box, query-agnostic attack that embeds malicious typographic instructions into physical objects perceivable by the LVLM. PPIA requires no access to the model, its inputs, or internal pipeline, and operates solely through visual observation. It combines offline selection of highly recognizable and semantically effective visual prompts with strategic environment-aware placement guided by spatiotemporal attention, ensuring that the injected prompts are both perceivable and influential on model behavior. We evaluate PPIA across 10 state-of-the-art LVLMs in both simulated and real-world settings on tasks including visual question answering, planning, and navigation, PPIA achieves attack success rates up to 98%, with strong robustness under varying physical conditions such as distance, viewpoint, and illumination. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/2023cghacker/Physical-Prompt-Injection-Attack.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17383
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physical Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models
Ling, Chen
Hu, Kai
Liu, Hangcheng
Han, Xingshuo
Zhang, Tianwei
Ou, Changhai
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world intelligent systems for perception and reasoning in open physical environments. While LVLMs are known to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, existing methods either require access to input channels or depend on knowledge of user queries, assumptions that rarely hold in practical deployments. We propose the first Physical Prompt Injection Attack (PPIA), a black-box, query-agnostic attack that embeds malicious typographic instructions into physical objects perceivable by the LVLM. PPIA requires no access to the model, its inputs, or internal pipeline, and operates solely through visual observation. It combines offline selection of highly recognizable and semantically effective visual prompts with strategic environment-aware placement guided by spatiotemporal attention, ensuring that the injected prompts are both perceivable and influential on model behavior. We evaluate PPIA across 10 state-of-the-art LVLMs in both simulated and real-world settings on tasks including visual question answering, planning, and navigation, PPIA achieves attack success rates up to 98%, with strong robustness under varying physical conditions such as distance, viewpoint, and illumination. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/2023cghacker/Physical-Prompt-Injection-Attack.
title Physical Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17383