Under the Skin: Backdoor Infection in Multimodal Large Language Models

Overview & Synopsis

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance in generating text conditioned on inputs from different modalities. In this work, we introduce backdoor infection, a cross-modal attack framework targeting MLLMs. Starting from a model already injected with a backdoor in one modality, our attack constructs a corresponding trigger in another modality, called the infected modality. Exploiting the model's shared latent space, the trigger in the infected modality reliably activates the malicious behavior, without modifying or poisoning the infected modality during training. We further develop a lightweight, constraint-aware optimization method for efficient and practical trigger generation. Extensive experiments across several state-of-the-art MLLMs, including LLaVA, InternVL, Qwen-VL, and Gemma, demonstrate that our approach identifies cross-modal triggers that are more efficient, effective, and less detectable than direct optimization baselines, highlighting a critical new threat vector in multimodal systems.