Once Poisoned, Arbitrarily Controlled: A Programmable Backdoor in VLMs
Existing vision-language model (VLM) backdoors are usually treated as static vulnerabilities: one-to-one and N-to-N attacks bind one or more triggers to a finite set of targets before victim training. This assumption substantially underestimates the threat. We show that a single poisoning phase can implant a programmable backdoor into a VLM, allowing an attacker to choose previously unseen target-caption semantics at inference time and synthesize corresponding stealthy triggers on demand. Unlike fixed-mapping attacks, the proposed any-to-any caption-control paradigm decouples post-training target selection from poisoning, enabling dynamic control of target captions without retraining the ...
| Authors | Tao Lin, Gaojie Jin, Zongxin Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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