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Make Anything Match Your Target: Universal Adversarial Perturbations against Closed-Source MLLMs via Multi-Crop Routed Meta Optimization

About

Targeted adversarial attacks on closed-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been increasingly explored under black-box transfer, yet prior methods are predominantly sample-specific and offer limited reusability across inputs. We instead study a more stringent setting, Universal Targeted Transferable Adversarial Attacks (UTTAA), where a single perturbation must consistently steer arbitrary inputs toward a specified target across unknown commercial MLLMs. Naively adapting existing sample-wise attacks to this universal setting faces three core difficulties: (i) target supervision becomes high-variance due to target-crop randomness, (ii) token-wise matching is unreliable because universality suppresses image-specific cues that would otherwise anchor alignment, and (iii) few-source per-target adaptation is highly initialization-sensitive, which can degrade the attainable performance. In this work, we propose MCRMO-Attack, which stabilizes supervision via Multi-Crop Aggregation with an Attention-Guided Crop, improves token-level reliability through alignability-gated Token Routing, and meta-learns a cross-target perturbation prior that yields stronger per-target solutions. Across commercial MLLMs, we boost unseen-image attack success rate by +23.7\% on GPT-4o and +19.9\% on Gemini-2.0 over the strongest universal baseline.

Hui Lu, Yi Yu, Yiming Yang, Chenyu Yi, Xueyi Ke, Qixing Zhang, Bingquan Shen, Alex Kot, Xudong Jiang• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Universal Targeted Adversarial AttackUnseen (test)
KMRa52.6
18
Universal Targeted Adversarial AttackSeen Samples (Used for Optimization) (train)
KMRa17.8
18
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