Architectural Backdoors in Vision-Language Model Supply Chains via Representation Steering
Vision--Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed through a model supply chain in which pretrained checkpoints, architecture definitions, text encoders, and exported computation graphs are distributed by third parties and reused across downstream services. This reuse model creates a security-critical trust boundary: VLM deployments inherit not only learned parameters but also executable behavior encoded in shared model artifacts. In this paper, we show that a malicious provider can exploit this trust boundary by embedding architectural backdoors into VLM supply chains through representation steering. Our attack introduces dormant steering logic into the model architecture through a...
| Authors | Maria Rosaria Briglia, Igor Maljkovic, Antonio Emanuele Cinà et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 28 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 July 2026 |
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