Improving Adversarial Robustness in Vision-Language Models with Architecture and Prompt Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have seen a significant increase in both research interest and real-world applications across various domains, including healthcare, autonomous systems, and security. However, their growing prevalence demands higher reliability and safety including robustness to adversarial attacks. We systematically examine the possibility of incorporating adversarial robustness through various model design choices. We explore the effects of different vision encoders, the resolutions of vision encoders, and the size and type of language models. Additionally, we introduce novel, cost-effective approaches to enhance robustness through prompt engineering. By simply suggesting the possibility of adversarial perturbations or rephrasing questions, we demonstrate substantial improvements in model robustness against strong image-based attacks such as Auto-PGD. Our findings provide important guidelines for developing more robust VLMs, particularly for deployment in safety-critical environments where reliability and security are paramount. These insights are crucial for advancing the field of VLMs, ensuring they can be safely and effectively utilized in a wide range of applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".