Finding a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Combating Adversarial Text-To-Image Prompts with Text Summarization

Text-to-image models are vulnerable to the stepwise "Divide-and-Conquer Attack" (DACA) that utilize a large language model to obfuscate inappropriate content in prompts by wrapping sensitive text in a benign narrative. To mitigate stepwise DACA attacks, we propose a two-layer method involving text summarization followed by binary classification. We assembled the Adversarial Text-to-Image Prompt (ATTIP) dataset (N=940), which contained DACA-obfuscated and non-obfuscated prompts. From the ATTIP dataset, we created two summarized versions: one generated by a small encoder model and the other by a large language model. Then, we used an encoder classifier and a GPT-4o classifier to perform content moderation on the summarized and unsummarized prompts. When compared with a classifier that operated over the unsummarized data, our method improved F1 score performance by 31%. Further, the highest recorded F1 score achieved (98%) was produced by the encoder classifier on a summarized ATTIP variant. This study indicates that pre-classification text summarization can inoculate content detection models against stepwise DACA obfuscations.