9 papers
Architectural Backdoors in Vision-Language Model Supply Chains via Representation Steering
Maria Rosaria Briglia, Igor Maljkovic, Antonio Emanuele Cinà +3
Vision--Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed through a model supply chain in which pretrained checkpoints, architecture definitions, text encoders, and exported computa…
Steering Vectors are an Adversarial Attack Surface
Abzal Aidakhmetov, Donato Crisostomi, Tommaso Mencattini +3
Activation steering has become a popular way to control Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without fine-tuning. Since the technique is plug-and-play, users share datasets and prec…
Multi-objective Evolutionary Merging Enables Efficient Reasoning Models
Mario Iacobelli, Adrian Robert Minut, Tommaso Mencattini +5
Reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex problems by leveraging long chains of thought, but this deliberate reasoning incurs substantial inference-time cost. The Long…
Harnessing Hyperbolic Geometry for Harmful Prompt Detection and Sanitization
Igor Maljkovic, Maria Rosaria Briglia, Iacopo Masi +2
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become essential for tasks such as image synthesis, captioning, and retrieval by aligning textual and visual information in a shared embedding sp…
Not All Latent Spaces Are Flat: Hyperbolic Concept Control
Maria Rosaria Briglia, Simone Facchiano, Paolo Cursi +6
As modern text-to-image (T2I) models draw closer to synthesizing highly realistic content, the threat of unsafe content generation grows, and it becomes paramount to exercise contr…
A Provable Energy-Guided Test-Time Defense Boosting Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models
Mujtaba Hussain Mirza, Antonio D'Orazio, Odelia Melamed +1
Despite the rapid progress in multimodal models and Large Visual-Language Models (LVLM), they remain highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations, raising serious concerns about…