Safeguarding Vision-Language Models: Mitigating Vulnerabilities to
  Gaussian Noise in Perturbation-based Attacks
Authors: name: Jiawei Wang; name: Yushen Zuo; name: Yuanjun Chai; name: Zhendong Liu; name: Yichen Fu; name: Yichun Feng; name: Kin-man Lam
Published: 2025-04-02 02:35:19

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) extend the capabilities of Large Language
Models (LLMs) by incorporating visual information, yet they remain vulnerable
to jailbreak attacks, especially when processing noisy or corrupted images.
Although existing VLMs adopt security measures during training to mitigate such
attacks, vulnerabilities associated with noise-augmented visual inputs are
overlooked. In this work, we identify that missing noise-augmented training
causes critical security gaps: many VLMs are susceptible to even simple
perturbations such as Gaussian noise. To address this challenge, we propose
Robust-VLGuard, a multimodal safety dataset with aligned / misaligned
image-text pairs, combined with noise-augmented fine-tuning that reduces attack
success rates while preserving functionality of VLM. For stronger
optimization-based visual perturbation attacks, we propose DiffPure-VLM,
leveraging diffusion models to convert adversarial perturbations into
Gaussian-like noise, which can be defended by VLMs with noise-augmented safety
fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that the distribution-shifting
property of diffusion model aligns well with our fine-tuned VLMs, significantly
mitigating adversarial perturbations across varying intensities. The dataset
and code are available at https://github.com/JarvisUSTC/DiffPure-RobustVLM.