PA-Attack: Guiding Gray-Box Attacks on LVLM Vision Encoders with Prototypes and Attention

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mei, Hefei, Wang, Zirui, Xu, Chang, Guo, Jianyuan, Dong, Minjing
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Mei, Hefei
Wang, Zirui
Xu, Chang
Guo, Jianyuan
Dong, Minjing
author_facet Mei, Hefei
Wang, Zirui
Xu, Chang
Guo, Jianyuan
Dong, Minjing
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are foundational to modern multimodal applications, yet their susceptibility to adversarial attacks remains a critical concern. Prior white-box attacks rarely generalize across tasks, and black-box methods depend on expensive transfer, which limits efficiency. The vision encoder, standardized and often shared across LVLMs, provides a stable gray-box pivot with strong cross-model transfer. Building on this premise, we introduce PA-Attack (Prototype-Anchored Attentive Attack). PA-Attack begins with a prototype-anchored guidance that provides a stable attack direction towards a general and dissimilar prototype, tackling the attribute-restricted issue and limited task generalization of vanilla attacks. Building on this, we propose a two-stage attention enhancement mechanism: (i) leverage token-level attention scores to concentrate perturbations on critical visual tokens, and (ii) adaptively recalibrate attention weights to track the evolving attention during the adversarial process. Extensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks and LVLM architectures show that PA-Attack achieves an average 75.1% score reduction rate (SRR), demonstrating strong attack effectiveness, efficiency, and task generalization in LVLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/hefeimei06/PA-Attack.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PA-Attack: Guiding Gray-Box Attacks on LVLM Vision Encoders with Prototypes and Attention
Mei, Hefei
Wang, Zirui
Xu, Chang
Guo, Jianyuan
Dong, Minjing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are foundational to modern multimodal applications, yet their susceptibility to adversarial attacks remains a critical concern. Prior white-box attacks rarely generalize across tasks, and black-box methods depend on expensive transfer, which limits efficiency. The vision encoder, standardized and often shared across LVLMs, provides a stable gray-box pivot with strong cross-model transfer. Building on this premise, we introduce PA-Attack (Prototype-Anchored Attentive Attack). PA-Attack begins with a prototype-anchored guidance that provides a stable attack direction towards a general and dissimilar prototype, tackling the attribute-restricted issue and limited task generalization of vanilla attacks. Building on this, we propose a two-stage attention enhancement mechanism: (i) leverage token-level attention scores to concentrate perturbations on critical visual tokens, and (ii) adaptively recalibrate attention weights to track the evolving attention during the adversarial process. Extensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks and LVLM architectures show that PA-Attack achieves an average 75.1% score reduction rate (SRR), demonstrating strong attack effectiveness, efficiency, and task generalization in LVLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/hefeimei06/PA-Attack.
title PA-Attack: Guiding Gray-Box Attacks on LVLM Vision Encoders with Prototypes and Attention
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19418