# The Security Threat of Compressed Projectors in Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 18 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [Jailbreak in pieces: Compositional Adversarial Attacks on Multi-Modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14539/) (2023)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Enhancing Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models via Intermediate Projector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13739/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The choice of a suitable visual language projector (VLP) is critical to the successful training of large visual language models (LVLMs). Mainstream VLPs can be broadly categorized into compressed and uncompressed projectors, and each offers distinct advantages in performance and computational efficiency. However, their security implications have not been thoroughly examined. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals significant differences in their security profiles: compressed projectors exhibit substantial vulnerabilities, allowing adversaries to successfully compromise LVLMs even with minimal knowledge of structure information. In stark contrast, uncompressed projectors demonstrate robust security properties and do not introduce additional vulnerabilities. These findings provide critical guidance for researchers in selecting optimal VLPs that enhance the security and reliability of visual language models. The code is available at https://github.com/btzyd/TCP.