Penny Wise, Pixel Foolish: Bypassing Price Constraints in Multimodal Agents via Visual Adversarial Perturbations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qian, Jiachen, Kang, Zhaolu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Qian, Jiachen
Kang, Zhaolu
author_facet Qian, Jiachen
Kang, Zhaolu
contents The rapid proliferation of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled mobile agents to execute high-stakes financial transactions, but their adversarial robustness remains underexplored. We identify Visual Dominance Hallucination (VDH), where imperceptible visual cues can override textual price evidence in screenshot-based, price-constrained settings and lead agents to irrational decisions. We propose PriceBlind, a stealthy white-box adversarial attack framework for controlled screenshot-based evaluation. PriceBlind exploits the modality gap in CLIP-based encoders via a Semantic-Decoupling Loss that aligns the image embedding with low-cost, value-associated anchors while preserving pixel-level fidelity. On E-ShopBench, PriceBlind achieves around 80% ASR in white-box evaluation; under a simplified single-turn coordinate-selection protocol, Ensemble-DI-FGSM transfers with roughly 35-41% ASR across GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. We also show that robust encoders and Verify-then-Act defenses reduce ASR substantially, though with some clean-accuracy trade-off.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_16515
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Penny Wise, Pixel Foolish: Bypassing Price Constraints in Multimodal Agents via Visual Adversarial Perturbations
Qian, Jiachen
Kang, Zhaolu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
The rapid proliferation of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled mobile agents to execute high-stakes financial transactions, but their adversarial robustness remains underexplored. We identify Visual Dominance Hallucination (VDH), where imperceptible visual cues can override textual price evidence in screenshot-based, price-constrained settings and lead agents to irrational decisions. We propose PriceBlind, a stealthy white-box adversarial attack framework for controlled screenshot-based evaluation. PriceBlind exploits the modality gap in CLIP-based encoders via a Semantic-Decoupling Loss that aligns the image embedding with low-cost, value-associated anchors while preserving pixel-level fidelity. On E-ShopBench, PriceBlind achieves around 80% ASR in white-box evaluation; under a simplified single-turn coordinate-selection protocol, Ensemble-DI-FGSM transfers with roughly 35-41% ASR across GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. We also show that robust encoders and Verify-then-Act defenses reduce ASR substantially, though with some clean-accuracy trade-off.
title Penny Wise, Pixel Foolish: Bypassing Price Constraints in Multimodal Agents via Visual Adversarial Perturbations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16515