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Universal Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs via Target-View Routed Meta Optimization

Artificial Intelligence 2026-04-21 v2

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.23179,
  title  = {Universal Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs via Target-View Routed Meta Optimization},
  author = {Hui Lu and Yi Yu and Yiming Yang and Chenyu Yi and Xueyi Ke and Qixing Zhang and Bingquan Shen and Alex Kot and Xudong Jiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.23179},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:28:04.853Z