A Frustratingly Simple Yet Highly Effective Attack Baseline: Over 90% Success Rate Against the Strong Black-box Models of GPT-4.5/4o/o1

Zhaoyi Li, Xiaohan Zhao, Dong-Dong Wu, Jiacheng Cui, Zhiqiang Shen

Keywords: Adversraial Attack, Local-level Matching, Vision-Language Models

TL;DR: We propose a simple yet highly effective transfer-based baseline for attacking black-box closed-source LVLMs.

Abstract: Despite promising performance on open-source large vision-language models (LVLMs), transfer-based targeted attacks often fail against closed-source commercial LVLMs. Analyzing failed adversarial perturbations reveals that the learned perturbations typically originate from a uniform distribution and lack clear semantic details, resulting in unintended responses. This critical absence of semantic information leads commercial black-box LVLMs to either ignore the perturbation entirely or misinterpret its embedded semantics, thereby causing the attack to fail. To overcome these issues, we propose to refine semantic clarity by encoding explicit semantic details within local regions, thus ensuring the capture of finer-grained features and inter-model transferability, and by concentrating modifications on semantically rich areas rather than applying them uniformly. To achieve this, we propose *a simple yet highly effective baseline*: at each optimization step, the adversarial image is cropped randomly by a controlled aspect ratio and scale, resized, and then aligned with the target image in the embedding space. While the naive source-target matching method has been utilized before in the literature, we are the first to provide a tight analysis, which establishes a close connection between perturbation optimization and semantics. Experimental results confirm our hypothesis. Our adversarial examples crafted with local-aggregated perturbations focused on crucial regions exhibit surprisingly good transferability to commercial LVLMs, including GPT-4.5, GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-flash, Claude-3.5/3.7-sonnet, and even reasoning models like o1, Claude-3.7-thinking and Gemini-2.0-flash-thinking. Our approach achieves success rates exceeding 90\% on GPT-4.5, 4o, and o1, significantly outperforming all prior state-of-the-art attack methods with lower $\ell_1/\ell_2$ perturbations. Our optimized adversarial examples under different configurations are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MBZUAI-LLM/M-Attack_AdvSamples and our training code at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/M-Attack.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 16081