PLA: Prompt Learning Attack Against Text-To-Image Generative Models
Xinqi Lyu, Yihao Liu, Yanjie Li, Bin Xiao
Abstract
Text-to-Image (T2I) models have gained widespread adoption across various applications. Despite the success, the potential misuse of T2I models poses significant risks of generating Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. To investigate the vulnerability of T2I models, this paper delves into adversarial attacks to bypass the safety mechanisms under black-box settings. Most previous methods rely on word substitution to search adversarial prompts. Due to limited search space, this leads to suboptimal performance compared to gradient-based training. However, black-box settings present unique challenges to training gradient-driven attack methods, since there is no access to the internal architecture and parameters of T2I models. To facilitate the learning of adversarial prompts in black-box settings, we propose a novel prompt learning attack framework (), where insightful gradient-based training tailored to blackbox T2I models is designed by utilizing multimodal similarities. Experiments show that our new method can effectively attack the safety mechanisms of black-box T2I models including prompt filters and post-hoc safety checkers with a high success rate compared to state-of-the-art methods. Warning: This paper may contain offensive modelgenerated content.
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Cited by top-tier papers5
- LOMIA: Label-Only Membership Inference Attacks against Pre-trained Large Vision-Language ModelsYihao Liu, Xinqi Lyu, Dong Wang, Yanjie Li et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 3 citations
- Cert-LAS: Toward Certified Model Ownership Verification for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Layer-Adaptive SmoothingLeyi Qi, Yiming Li, Siyuan Liang, Zhengzhong Tu et al.ICML 2026 · 1 citation
- FeatureFool: Zero-Query Fooling of Video Models via Feature MapDuoxun Tang, Xi Xiao, Guangwu Hu, Kangkang Sun et al.CVPR 2026 · 1 citation
- Breaking Multimodal LLM Safety via Video-Driven PromptingDong Wang, XIANGYU HE, Xinqi Lyu, Bin XiaoCVPR 2026
- Red-teaming Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models via Poisoning Knowledge BasesXinqi Lyu, Yihao Liu, Dong Wang, Bin XiaoCVPR 2026
Builds on18
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh et al.ICML 2021 · 47,906 citations
- Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic ModelsJonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, Pieter AbbeelNeurIPS 2020 · 35,902 citations
- High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion ModelsRobin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser et al.CVPR 2022 · 13,123 citations
- Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language UnderstandingChitwan Saharia, William Chan, Saurabh Saxena, Lala Li et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 8,965 citations
- SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image SynthesisDustin Podell, Zion English, Kyle Lacey, Andreas Blattmann et al.ICLR 2024 · 4,569 citations
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