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Ziqi Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Ziqi Zhou.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Imperceptible and Reversible Adversarial Examples against Vision-Language Models for Privacy Protection

Vision Language Models (VLMs) offer powerful multimodal ability but also expose users to text-based privacy attacks where adversaries crawl online photos and query VLMs to extract sensitive attributes. Existing reversible adversarial example (RAE) methods protect images in purely visual tasks but fail in multimodal settings, and current adversarial examples on VLMs rely on high frequency noise that severely degrades visual quality. We propose CloakDiff, the first framework for reversible, high fidelity privacy protection against text-based query attacks in VLMs. CloakDiff produces imperceptible adversarial examples by combining diffusion based adversarial editing with an invertible network that embeds the original image for lossless recovery. It perturbs both pixel space embeddings and manipulates latent cross attention maps to ensure strong cross-model and cross-prompt transferability while preserving global visual structure. To further enhance fidelity, we design EDM Heuristic Sampling, a principled diffusion schedule for adversarial guidance. Experiments on multiple datasets and VLMs demonstrate that CloakDiff delivers multimodal privacy preservation with high visual quality and reversibility.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Dual-branch Robust Unlearnable Examples

Unlearnable examples (UEs) aim to compromise model training by injecting imperceptible perturbations to clean samples. However, existing UE schemes exhibit limited robustness against advanced defenses due to their heuristic design or narrowly scoped domain perturbations. To address this, we propose \texttt{DUNE}, a \underline{\textbf{D}}ual-branch \underline{\textbf{UN}}learnable \underline{\textbf{E}}nsemble perturbation optimization approach. Specifically, \texttt{DUNE} separately optimizes perturbations in the spatial and color domains to establish the mapping between perturbations and shift-induced labels. This design extends the perturbation domain to increase noise intensity for improving robustness and drives the models to learn perturbation-oriented features with degraded generalization, thereby achieving unlearnability. To strengthen \texttt{DUNE}'s performance, we further propose an unlearnability-enhancing ensemble strategy that aggregates diverse pre-trained models during the dual-branch optimization. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets CIFAR-10 and ImageNet verify that \texttt{DUNE}'s robustness outperforms 12 SOTA UE schemes under 7 mainstream defenses, yielding a lower average test accuracy of 14.95% to 50.82%.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

VFACamou: View-Fused Adversarial Camouflage for Environment-Adaptive Physical Evasion

Adversarial camouflage in the physical world remains highly challenging, particularly under UAV reconnaissance where targets undergo continuous geometric changes and extreme illumination variations. Existing methods either optimize 2D digital perturbations that fail to generalize to dynamic viewpoints or produce visually unnatural textures that cannot be deployed in real scenarios. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end framework for adversarial camouflage generation that automatically produces wearable adversarial patterns and maintains stable attack performance in real physical environments with changing viewpoints, poses, and lighting conditions. Our method integrates UV-volume rendering with a diffusion-based texture generator, enabling consistent appearance under varying scales, poses, and lighting conditions. To ensure environmental realism, we propose an illumination color consistency estimator that extracts dominant background attributes and guides a natural texture loss to align the generated UV texture with the surrounding environment. A multi-scale dynamic training strategy further enhances robustness against viewpoint shifts and body deformation. Extensive experiments across multiple mainstream detectors demonstrate that our method achieves strong and stable physical attack performance while maintaining high perceptual naturalness, reducing human detection rates without introducing unnatural artifacts.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Learning Cardiac Electrophysiology Digital Twins Through Agentic Discovery of Hybrid Structure

Building personalized cardiac electrophysiology (EP) digital twins requires identifying the appropriate model structure for each patient, not merely fitting parameters. Traditional methods rely on experts to manually prescribe hybrid physics-neural architectures, which requires deep domain expertise and does not transfer across patients. Recent works have applied large language models (LLMs) to generate or act as hybrid models. However, despite their promising generalization capacity, these LLM-based methods lack the structural priors needed for stable cardiac simulations. Hence, we propose LEADS, a framework that formulates cardiac EP domain knowledge as a structured action space and utilizes an LLM agent to discover hybrid models. The agent follows an iterative reasoning-and-action loop to select, combine, and refine hybrid models, whilst gradient descent handles parameter fitting. The proposed LEADS designs every candidate model towards physically grounded, interpretable, and numerically stable, while allowing open-ended architectural discovery. We validate LEADS on synthetic data with three ground-truth reaction models and on real cardiac EP data, demonstrating that it outperforms both human-designed hybrid models and other LLM-based hybrid modeling.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

BadRobot: Jailbreaking Embodied LLM Agents in the Physical World

Embodied AI represents systems where AI is integrated into physical entities. Large Language Model (LLM), which exhibits powerful language understanding abilities, has been extensively employed in embodied AI by facilitating sophisticated task planning. However, a critical safety issue remains overlooked: could these embodied LLMs perpetrate harmful behaviors? In response, we introduce BadRobot, a novel attack paradigm aiming to make embodied LLMs violate safety and ethical constraints through typical voice-based user-system interactions. Specifically, three vulnerabilities are exploited to achieve this type of attack: (i) manipulation of LLMs within robotic systems, (ii) misalignment between linguistic outputs and physical actions, and (iii) unintentional hazardous behaviors caused by world knowledge's flaws. Furthermore, we construct a benchmark of various malicious physical action queries to evaluate BadRobot's attack performance. Based on this benchmark, extensive experiments against existing prominent embodied LLM frameworks (e.g., Voxposer, Code as Policies, and ProgPrompt) demonstrate the effectiveness of our BadRobot. Our code is available at https://github.com/Rookie143/BadRobot.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

Defending Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Manifold Trajectory Kinetics

Jailbreak prompts can bypass alignment guardrails in large language models (LLMs) and elicit unsafe outputs, making reliable deployment-time detection critical. Prior detection approaches largely rely on a fixed metric space, e.g., raw inputs, gradients, or hidden features, in which benign and jailbreak prompts are linearly separable. We show this assumption breaks under (i) pseudo-malicious prompts that are benign by intent but contain safety-related keywords, and (ii) adaptive attacks that explicitly optimize against the deployed detector. To overcome this limitation, we shift our focus from identifying a universal metric space to analyzing the more robust neighborhood structure of the underlying data manifold. We present Manifold Trajectory Kinetics (MTK), which treats an LLM as a kinetic system transforming inputs into outputs and detects jailbreaks by tracking how a prompt's neighborhood structure evolves across layers. Benign prompts remain close to benign neighborhoods throughout inference, whereas jailbreak prompts exhibit a characteristic trajectory that begins near malicious seeds and later strategically shifts toward benign neighborhoods to evade refusal.Across four LLMs and ten jailbreak attacks, MTK achieves strong robustness to both failure modes: on pseudo-malicious prompts, it attains a jailbreak true positive rate of 95% at a false positive rate of 5% on benign prompts and 2% on pseudo-malicious prompts, and under adaptive attacks, it maintains a true positive rate of 85%. We further demonstrate the superior performance of MTK for jailbreak detection in vision-language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Rookie143/mtk.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

SynerDiff: Synergetic Continuous Batching for Fast and Parallel Diffusion Model Inference

The expansion of Artificial Intelligence-generated content service requires diffusion model serving to simultaneously achieve high throughput and low task end-to-end (E2E) latency. However, existing continuous batching methods suffer from severe resource contention during UNet-VAE concurrency, leading to latency spikes. Furthermore, concurrent multi-task scheduling entails a trade-off between UNet throughput and VAE latency across varying scheduling strategies. To address these, we propose SynerDiff, an efficient continuous batching system built on intra-inter level synergy. At the intra-concurrency level, SynerDiff alleviates resource contention by pruning component-specific resource bottlenecks via VAE Chunking and Adaptive Skip-CFG. At the inter-concurrency level, leveraging components' differential sensitivity to scheduling granularities, a threshold-aware scheduler plans concurrent sequences and tunes intra-concurrency decisions to minimize VAE latency while maintaining UNet within high-throughput threshold. Additionally, a feedback controller dynamically adjusts this threshold based on queue loads to boost system capacity ceiling. Experimental results show that, SynerDiff improves throughput by 1.6$\times$ and decreases both average E2E and P99 tail latencies by up to 78.7\%, compared to benchmarks while guaranteeing high image fidelity.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Transferable Physical-World Adversarial Patches Against Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Deep learning drives major advances in autonomous driving (AD), where object detectors are central to perception. However, adversarial attacks pose significant threats to the reliability and safety of these systems, with physical adversarial patches representing a particularly potent form of attack. Physical adversarial patch attacks pose severe risks but are usually crafted for a single model, yielding poor transferability to unseen detectors. We propose AdvAD, a transfer-based physical attack against object detection in autonomous driving. Instead of targeting a specific detector, AdvAD optimizes adversarial patches over multiple detection models in a unified framework, encouraging the learned perturbations to capture shared vulnerabilities across architectures. The optimization process adaptively balances model contributions and enforces robustness to physical variations. It further employs data augmentation and geometric transformations to maintain patch effectiveness under diverse physical conditions. Experiments in both digital and real-world settings show that AdvAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks in performance and transferability.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Transferable Physical-World Adversarial Patches Against Pedestrian Detection Models

Physical adversarial patch attacks critically threaten pedestrian detection, causing surveillance and autonomous driving systems to miss pedestrians and creating severe safety risks. Despite their effectiveness in controlled settings, existing physical attacks face two major limitations in practice: they lack systematic disruption of the multi-stage decision pipeline, enabling residual modules to offset perturbations, and they fail to model complex physical variations, leading to poor robustness. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel pedestrian adversarial patch generation method that combines multi-stage collaborative attacks with robustness enhancement under physical diversity, called TriPatch. Specifically, we design a triplet loss consisting of detection confidence suppression, bounding-box offset amplification, and non-maximum suppression (NMS) disruption, which jointly act across different stages of the detection pipeline. In addition, we introduce an appearance consistency loss to constrain the color distribution of the patch, thereby improving its adaptability under diverse imaging conditions, and incorporate data augmentation to further enhance robustness against complex physical perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TriPatch achieves a higher attack success rate across multiple detector models compared to existing approaches.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Towards Reliable Forgetting: A Survey on Machine Unlearning Verification

With growing demands for privacy protection, security, and legal compliance (e.g., GDPR), machine unlearning has emerged as a critical technique for ensuring the controllability and regulatory alignment of machine learning models. However, a fundamental challenge in this field lies in effectively verifying whether unlearning operations have been successfully and thoroughly executed. Despite a growing body of work on unlearning techniques, verification methodologies remain comparatively underexplored and often fragmented. Existing approaches lack a unified taxonomy and a systematic framework for evaluation. To bridge this gap, this paper presents the first structured survey of machine unlearning verification methods. We propose a taxonomy that organizes current techniques into two principal categories -- behavioral verification and parametric verification -- based on the type of evidence used to assess unlearning fidelity. We examine representative methods within each category, analyze their underlying assumptions, strengths, and limitations, and identify potential vulnerabilities in practical deployment. In closing, we articulate a set of open problems in current verification research, aiming to provide a foundation for developing more robust, efficient, and theoretically grounded unlearning verification mechanisms.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Robot Collapse: Supply Chain Backdoor Attacks Against VLM-based Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation policies are increasingly empowered by \textit{large language models} (LLMs) and \textit{vision-language models} (VLMs), leveraging their understanding and perception capabilities. Recently, inference-time attacks against robotic manipulation have been extensively studied, yet backdoor attacks targeting model supply chain security in robotic policies remain largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose \texttt{TrojanRobot}, a backdoor injection framework for model supply chain attack scenarios, which embeds a malicious module into modular robotic policies via backdoor relationships to manipulate the LLM-to-VLM pathway and compromise the system. Our vanilla design instantiates this module as a backdoor-finetuned VLM. To further enhance attack performance, we propose a prime scheme by introducing the concept of \textit{LVLM-as-a-backdoor}, which leverages \textit{in-context instruction learning} (ICIL) to steer \textit{large vision-language model} (LVLM) behavior through backdoored system prompts. Moreover, we develop three types of prime attacks, \textit{permutation}, \textit{stagnation}, and \textit{intentional}, achieving flexible backdoor attack effects. Extensive physical-world and simulator experiments on 18 real-world manipulation tasks and 4 VLMs verify the superiority of proposed \texttt{TrojanRobot}

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

UFVideo: Towards Unified Fine-Grained Video Cooperative Understanding with Large Language Models

With the advancement of multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs), Video LLMs have been further developed to perform on holistic and specialized video understanding. However, existing works are limited to specialized video understanding tasks, failing to achieve a comprehensive and multi-grained video perception. To bridge this gap, we introduce UFVideo, the first Video LLM with unified multi-grained cooperative understanding capabilities. Specifically, we design unified visual-language guided alignment to flexibly handle video understanding across global, pixel and temporal scales within a single model. UFVideo dynamically encodes the visual and text inputs of different tasks and generates the textual response, temporal localization, or grounded mask. Additionally, to evaluate challenging multi-grained video understanding tasks, we construct the UFVideo-Bench consisting of three distinct collaborative tasks within the scales, which demonstrates UFVideo's flexibility and advantages over GPT-4o. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our model across 9 public benchmarks covering various common video understanding tasks, providing valuable insights for future Video LLMs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

UnlearnShield: Shielding Forgotten Privacy against Unlearning Inversion

Machine unlearning is an emerging technique that aims to remove the influence of specific data from trained models, thereby enhancing privacy protection. However, recent research has uncovered critical privacy vulnerabilities, showing that adversaries can exploit unlearning inversion to reconstruct data that was intended to be erased. Despite the severity of this threat, dedicated defenses remain lacking. To address this gap, we propose UnlearnShield, the first defense specifically tailored to counter unlearning inversion. UnlearnShield introduces directional perturbations in the cosine representation space and regulates them through a constraint module to jointly preserve model accuracy and forgetting efficacy, thereby reducing inversion risk while maintaining utility. Experiments demonstrate that it achieves a good trade-off among privacy protection, accuracy, and forgetting.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Enhancing Text-to-Image Generation via End-Edge Collaborative Hybrid Super-Resolution

Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) has made significant strides, with high-resolution text-to-image (T2I) generation becoming increasingly critical for improving users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Although resource-constrained edge computing adequately supports fast low-resolution T2I generations, achieving high-resolution output still faces the challenge of ensuring image fidelity at the cost of latency. To address this, we first investigate the performance of super-resolution (SR) methods for image enhancement, confirming a fundamental trade-off that lightweight learning-based SR struggles to recover fine details, while diffusion-based SR achieves higher fidelity at a substantial computational cost. Motivated by these observations, we propose an end-edge collaborative generation-enhancement framework. Upon receiving a T2I generation task, the system first generates a low-resolution image based on adaptively selected denoising steps and super-resolution scales at the edge side, which is then partitioned into patches and processed by a region-aware hybrid SR policy. This policy applies a diffusion-based SR model to foreground patches for detail recovery and a lightweight learning-based SR model to background patches for efficient upscaling, ultimately stitching the enhanced ones into the high-resolution image. Experiments show that our system reduces service latency by 33% compared with baselines while maintaining competitive image quality.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Erosion Attack for Adversarial Training to Enhance Semantic Segmentation Robustness

Existing segmentation models exhibit significant vulnerability to adversarial attacks.To improve robustness, adversarial training incorporates adversarial examples into model training. However, existing attack methods consider only global semantic information and ignore contextual semantic relationships within the samples, limiting the effectiveness of adversarial training. To address this issue, we propose EroSeg-AT, a vulnerability-aware adversarial training framework that leverages EroSeg to generate adversarial examples. EroSeg first selects sensitive pixels based on pixel-level confidence and then progressively propagates perturbations to higher-confidence pixels, effectively disrupting the semantic consistency of the samples. Experimental results show that, compared to existing methods, our approach significantly improves attack effectiveness and enhances model robustness under adversarial training.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Vanish into Thin Air: Cross-prompt Universal Adversarial Attacks for SAM2

Recent studies reveal the vulnerability of the image segmentation foundation model SAM to adversarial examples. Its successor, SAM2, has attracted significant attention due to its strong generalization capability in video segmentation. However, its robustness remains unexplored, and it is unclear whether existing attacks on SAM can be directly transferred to SAM2. In this paper, we first analyze the performance gap of existing attacks between SAM and SAM2 and highlight two key challenges arising from their architectural differences: directional guidance from the prompt and semantic entanglement across consecutive frames. To address these issues, we propose UAP-SAM2, the first cross-prompt universal adversarial attack against SAM2 driven by dual semantic deviation. For cross-prompt transferability, we begin by designing a target-scanning strategy that divides each frame into k regions, each randomly assigned a prompt, to reduce prompt dependency during optimization. For effectiveness, we design a dual semantic deviation framework that optimizes a UAP by distorting the semantics within the current frame and disrupting the semantic consistency across consecutive frames. Extensive experiments on six datasets across two segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for SAM2. The comparative results show that UAP-SAM2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks by a large margin.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

SegTrans: Transferable Adversarial Examples for Segmentation Models

Segmentation models exhibit significant vulnerability to adversarial examples in white-box settings, but existing adversarial attack methods often show poor transferability across different segmentation models. While some researchers have explored transfer-based adversarial attack (i.e., transfer attack) methods for segmentation models, the complex contextual dependencies within these models and the feature distribution gaps between surrogate and target models result in unsatisfactory transfer success rates. To address these issues, we propose SegTrans, a novel transfer attack framework that divides the input sample into multiple local regions and remaps their semantic information to generate diverse enhanced samples. These enhanced samples replace the original ones for perturbation optimization, thereby improving the transferability of adversarial examples across different segmentation models. Unlike existing methods, SegTrans only retains local semantic information from the original input, rather than using global semantic information to optimize perturbations. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, PASCAL VOC and Cityscapes, four different segmentation models, and three backbone networks show that SegTrans significantly improves adversarial transfer success rates without introducing additional computational overhead. Compared to the current state-of-the-art methods, SegTrans achieves an average increase of 8.55% in transfer attack success rate and improves computational efficiency by more than 100%.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Towards Real-World Deepfake Detection: A Diverse In-the-wild Dataset of Forgery Faces

Deepfakes, leveraging advanced AIGC (Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content) techniques, create hyper-realistic synthetic images and videos of human faces, posing a significant threat to the authenticity of social media. While this real-world threat is increasingly prevalent, existing academic evaluations and benchmarks for detecting deepfake forgery often fall short to achieve effective application for their lack of specificity, limited deepfake diversity, restricted manipulation techniques.To address these limitations, we introduce RedFace (Real-world-oriented Deepfake Face), a specialized facial deepfake dataset, comprising over 60,000 forged images and 1,000 manipulated videos derived from authentic facial features, to bridge the gap between academic evaluations and real-world necessity. Unlike prior benchmarks, which typically rely on academic methods to generate deepfakes, RedFace utilizes 9 commercial online platforms to integrate the latest deepfake technologies found "in the wild", effectively simulating real-world black-box scenarios.Moreover, RedFace's deepfakes are synthesized using bespoke algorithms, allowing it to capture diverse and evolving methods used by real-world deepfake creators. Extensive experimental results on RedFace (including cross-domain, intra-domain, and real-world social network dissemination simulations) verify the limited practicality of existing deepfake detection schemes against real-world applications. We further perform a detailed analysis of the RedFace dataset, elucidating the reason of its impact on detection performance compared to conventional datasets. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/kikyou-220/RedFace.

cs.CV↗