Enhancing Adversarial Transferability in Visual-Language Pre-training Models via Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack

Xin Liu, Aoyang Zhou, Kun He


Abstract
Visual-Language Pre-training (VLP) models have achieved significant performance across various downstream tasks. However, they remain vulnerable to adversarial examples. While prior efforts focus on improving the adversarial transferability of multimodal adversarial examples through cross-modal interactions, these approaches suffer from overfitting issues, due to a lack of input diversity by relying excessively on information from adversarial examples in one modality when crafting attacks in another. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from strategies in some adversarial training methods and propose a novel attack called Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack (LSSA). LSSA randomly shuffles one of the local image blocks, thus expanding the original image-text pairs, generating adversarial images, and sampling around them. Then, it utilizes both the original and sampled images to generate the adversarial texts. Extensive experiments on multiple models and datasets demonstrate that LSSA significantly enhances the transferability of multimodal adversarial examples across diverse VLP models and downstream tasks. Moreover, LSSA outperforms other advanced attacks on Large Vision-Language Models.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.13
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
231–245
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.findings-naacl.13/
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Cite (ACL):
Xin Liu, Aoyang Zhou, and Kun He. 2025. Enhancing Adversarial Transferability in Visual-Language Pre-training Models via Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 231–245, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Adversarial Transferability in Visual-Language Pre-training Models via Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack (Liu et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.findings-naacl.13.pdf