Scale-Induced Semantic Shift in Visual Prompt Injection Against VLMs and Web Agents
Yiheng Zhao, Runze Ji, Chenyu Yi, Yi Yu, Bingquan Shen, Alex Kot, Xudong Jiang
原文摘要
Visual content in multimedia systems may be resized, compressed, or re-rendered before it is interpreted by a vision-language model. We study a security failure mode in which these transformations change the machine-readable semantics of an image: a textual instruction is not recovered at a $512\times512$ presentation resolution under our evaluation protocol but becomes recoverable after aggressive downsampling. We formulate this behavior as Scale-Induced Semantic Shift (SISS) and develop a closed-loop black-box framework that combines dual-scale verification, selective self-hardening, shallow-layer low-rank adaptation, and pixel-space noise regularization. On a fixed 300-case benchmark, the third SISS refinement round obtains a $58.75\%$ average attack success rate across four closed-source vision-language models, compared with $41.08\%$ for the strongest generation baseline. A controlled sweep bounds the effect to aggressive compression: average success decreases to $17.68\%$, $6.85\%$, and $5.60\%$ at $128\times128$, $224\times224$, and $336\times336$, respectively. In a downstream web-agent study, the generated images increase hidden-instruction perception, but absolute behavioral compromise remains about $4\%$. Generic input transformations provide little protection in a separate defense protocol, whereas the proposed ScaleGuard consistency detector reduces non-adaptive success from $61.4\%$ to $24.3\%$ and one-round defense-aware success from $42.5\%$ to $15.0\%$, with no observed rejection among matched clean controls. The results characterize a bounded but reproducible semantic inconsistency in multimedia preprocessing and motivate scale-consistent visual-language inference.
cs.AI