Anyattack: Towards Large-scale Self-supervised Adversarial Attacks on Vision-language Models

Due to their multimodal capabilities, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have found numerous impactful applications in real-world scenarios. However, recent studies have revealed that VLMs are vulnerable to image-based adversarial attacks, particularly targeted adversarial images that manipulate the model to generate harmful content specified by the adversary. Current attack methods rely on predefined target labels to create targeted adversarial attacks, which limits their scalability and applicability for large-scale robustness evaluations. In this paper, we propose AnyAttack, a self-supervised framework that generates targeted adversarial images for VLMs without label supervision, allowing any image to serve as a target for the attack.Our framework employs the "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm, with the adversarial noise generator pre-trained on the large-scale LAION-400M dataset.This large-scale pre-training endows our method with powerful transferability across a wide range of VLMs.Extensive experiments on five mainstream open-source VLMs (CLIP, BLIP, BLIP2, InstructBLIP, and MiniGPT-4) across three multimodal tasks (image-text retrieval, multimodal classification, and image captioning) demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack.Additionally, we successfully transfer AnyAttack to multiple commercial VLMs, including Google Gemini, Claude Sonnet, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI GPT.These results reveal an unprecedented risk to VLMs, highlighting the need for effective countermeasures.