arXiv:2606.15308cs.AI2026-06

攻击者可诱导多模态模型用更贵的强模型,无需改答案。

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

论文配图:Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用统一触发图降低弱模型置信度,迫使路由到强模型。
  • 在多个数据集上使强模型调用率提升超过30%。
  • 适合研究模型安全与计算资源分配的学者参考。

多模态大模型虽具强大视觉推理能力,但每次查询都调用大型模型成本过高。为降低成本,多模态模型级联先用廉价弱模型处理,仅当其输出置信度低时才调用强模型。然而,因弱模型置信度直接决定计算资源分配,该机制存在新攻击面:攻击者可通过操纵置信度,使查询始终被延迟至强模型。为此,我们提出强制延迟攻击(Forced Deferral Attack, FDA),一种针对图像的对抗攻击,通过优化温度平滑目标,学习通用边界触发器,使弱模型在触发输入上的词元分布趋向于从干净响应构造的低集中目标。在多个数据集、模型族和延迟指标下,FDA均显著提升强模型调用率,优于图像扰动与提示注入基线。结果表明,多模态级联系统易受计算分配操纵攻击,可在不直接影响答案正确性的情况下,强制使用高成本强模型。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

模型安全多模态对抗攻击计算效率

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