# Misusing Tools in Large Language Models With Visual Adversarial Examples

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03185 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03185/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00614/) (2023)
- [Visual Adversarial Examples Jailbreak Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13213/) (2023)
- [Abusing Images and Sounds for Indirect Instruction Injection in Multi-Modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10490/) (2023)
- [On the Exploitability of Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17194/) (2023)
- [Language Models that Seek for Knowledge: Modular Search & Generation for Dialogue and Prompt Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13224/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05459/) (2024)
- [AgentDojo: A Dynamic Environment to Evaluate Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13352/) (2024)
- [Eyes Closed, Safety On: Protecting Multimodal LLMs via Image-to-Text Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09572/) (2024)
- [Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12814/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15585/) (2025)
- [AutoDAN: Interpretable Gradient-Based Adversarial Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15140/) (2023)
- [The Task Shield: Enforcing Task Alignment to Defend Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16682/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Trustworthy LLM Agents: Threats and Countermeasures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09648/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models: Resources, Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07403/) (2024)
- [AgentDAM: Privacy Leakage Evaluation for Autonomous Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09780/) (2025)
- [Best-of-N Jailbreaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03556/) (2024)
- [Safety of Multimodal Large Language Models on Images and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00357/) (2024)
- [Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08837/) (2025)
- [Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11797/) (2023)
- [Ignore This Title and HackAPrompt: Exposing Systemic Vulnerabilities of LLMs through a Global Scale Prompt Hacking Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16119/) (2023)
- [Imprompter: Tricking LLM Agents into Improper Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14923/) (2024)
- [Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05206/) (2025)
- [Chain of Attack: On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models Against Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15720/) (2024)
- [LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19334/) (2024)
- [HiddenDetect: Detecting Jailbreak Attacks against Large Vision-Language Models via Monitoring Hidden States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14744/) (2025)
- [Failures to Find Transferable Image Jailbreaks Between Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15211/) (2024)
- [The Attack and Defense Landscape of Agentic AI: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11088/) (2026)
- [Attractive Metadata Attack: Inducing LLM Agents to Invoke Malicious Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02110/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Attacks of Vision Tasks in the Past 10 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23687/) (2024)
- [ADVEDM:Fine-grained Adversarial Attack against VLM-based Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16645/) (2025)
- [From Storage to Steering: Memory Control Flow Attacks on LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15125/) (2026)
- [Fun-tuning: Characterizing the Vulnerability of Proprietary LLMs to Optimization-based Prompt Injection Attacks via the Fine-Tuning Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09798/) (2025)
- [How Vulnerable Are AI Agents to Indirect Prompt Injections? Insights from a Large-Scale Public Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15714/) (2026)
- [A Framework for Formalizing LLM Agent Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19469/) (2026)
- [May I have your Attention? Breaking Fine-Tuning based Prompt Injection Defenses using Architecture-Aware Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07417/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being enhanced with the ability to use tools and to process multiple modalities. These new capabilities bring new benefits and also new security risks. In this work, we show that an attacker can use visual adversarial examples to cause attacker-desired tool usage. For example, the attacker could cause a victim LLM to delete calendar events, leak private conversations and book hotels. Different from prior work, our attacks can affect the confidentiality and integrity of user resources connected to the LLM while being stealthy and generalizable to multiple input prompts. We construct these attacks using gradient-based adversarial training and characterize performance along multiple dimensions. We find that our adversarial images can manipulate the LLM to invoke tools following real-world syntax almost always (~98%) while maintaining high similarity to clean images (~0.9 SSIM). Furthermore, using human scoring and automated metrics, we find that the attacks do not noticeably affect the conversation (and its semantics) between the user and the LLM.