Does Target Alignment Mean Target Recovery? An Evidence-Ladder Study of Adversarial Claims on Contrastive Encoders
Adversarial attacks on vision-language models optimize an image toward a text target, then cite the attacked model's similarity score as evidence of success. We ask whether that score - victim-space target alignment (VTS) - predicts recovery of the target by an independent model. We first build a measurement instrument: supervised judges outside the attacked geometry, real-target blend controls, shuffled-target negatives, and a reference level derived from a 50% target-image blend. Two preregistered studies then compare six contrastive encoders under a matched attack at three perturbation budgets. Robustly trained encoders (FARE, TeCoA, PMG, TRADES) transfer substantially more independent...
| Authors | Tao Yang, Jianying Zhou |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 8 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 October 2026 |
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