# Empirical Analysis of Large Vision-Language Models against Goal Hijacking via Visual Prompt Injection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03554 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03554/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 10 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)
- LLM safety and security / [Vision-language and text-to-image safety](https://mlsanity.com/safety/vision-language-and-text-to-image-safety/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09527/) (2022)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Survey of Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models Revealed by Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10844/) (2023)
- [Defense-Prefix for Preventing Typographic Attacks on CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04512/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [Navigating the Risks: A Survey of Security, Privacy, and Ethics Threats in LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09523/) (2024)
- [Manipulating Multimodal Agents via Cross-Modal Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14348/) (2025)
- [Exploring Response Uncertainty in MLLMs: An Empirical Evaluation under Misleading Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02708/) (2024)
- [Exploring Typographic Visual Prompts Injection Threats in Cross-Modality Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11519/) (2025)
- [SCAM: A Real-World Typographic Robustness Evaluation for Multimodal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04893/) (2025)
- [Image-based Prompt Injection: Hijacking Multimodal LLMs through Visually Embedded Adversarial Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03637/) (2026)
- [VII: Visual Instruction Injection for Jailbreaking Image-to-Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20999/) (2026)
- [Goal Hijacking Attack on Large Language Models via Pseudo-Conversation Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23678/) (2024)
- [AgentTypo: Adaptive Typographic Prompt Injection Attacks against Black-box Multimodal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04257/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27918/) (2026)
- [SaFeR-ToolKit: Structured Reasoning via Virtual Tool Calling for Multimodal Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02635/) (2026)
- [Covert Visual Prompt Injection against Commercial Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29418/) (2026)
- [A Systematic Study of Cross-Modal Typographic Attacks on Audio-Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03995/) (2026)
- [Piggybacking on Perception: Stealthy Concurrent Audio Prompt Injections against Multimodal LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28165/) (2026)
- [VLAGuard: A Framework for Evaluating and Mitigating Physical Attention Hijacking in Vision-Language-Action Robots within Wireless Sensor Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01028/) (2026)
- [QuISE: Defense against Typographic Attacks on VLMs via Query-Irrelevant Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13119/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore visual prompt injection (VPI) that maliciously exploits the ability of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to follow instructions drawn onto the input image. We propose a new VPI method, "goal hijacking via visual prompt injection" (GHVPI), that swaps the execution task of LVLMs from an original task to an alternative task designated by an attacker. The quantitative analysis indicates that GPT-4V is vulnerable to the GHVPI and demonstrates a notable attack success rate of 15.8%, which is an unignorable security risk. Our analysis also shows that successful GHVPI requires high character recognition capability and instruction-following ability in LVLMs.