{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/vqattack-transferable-adversarial-attacks-on","title":"VQAttack: Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Visual Question Answering via Pre-trained Models","arxiv_id":"2402.11083","date":"2024-02-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ziyi Yin","Muchao Ye","Tianrong Zhang","Jiaqi Wang","Han Liu","Jinghui Chen","Ting Wang","Fenglong Ma"],"abstract":"Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision and natural language process fields. Although the ``pre-training & finetuning'' learning paradigm significantly improves the VQA performance, the adversarial robustness of such a learning paradigm has not been explored. In this paper, we delve into a new problem: using a pre-trained multimodal source model to create adversarial image-text pairs and then transferring them to attack the target VQA models. Correspondingly, we propose a novel VQAttack model, which can iteratively generate both image and text perturbations with the designed modules: the large language model (LLM)-enhanced image attack and the cross-modal joint attack module. At each iteration, the LLM-enhanced image attack module first optimizes the latent representation-based loss to generate feature-level image perturbations. Then it incorporates an LLM to further enhance the image perturbations by optimizing the designed masked answer anti-recovery loss. The cross-modal joint attack module will be triggered at a specific iteration, which updates the image and text perturbations sequentially. Notably, the text perturbation updates are based on both the learned gradients in the word embedding space and word synonym-based substitution. Experimental results on two VQA datasets with five validated models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VQAttack in the transferable attack setting, compared with state-of-the-art baselines. This work reveals a significant blind spot in the ``pre-training & fine-tuning'' paradigm on VQA tasks. Source codes will be released.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11083v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.11083v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"adversarial-robustness","task_name":"Adversarial Robustness"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"large-language-model","task_name":"Large Language Model"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.11083","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2402.11083"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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