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Received β€” 5 March 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

Image-based Prompt Injection: Hijacking Multimodal LLMs through Visually Embedded Adversarial Instructions

arXiv:2603.03637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate vision and text to power applications, but this integration introduces new vulnerabilities. We study Image-based Prompt Injection (IPI), a black-box attack in which adversarial instructions are embedded into natural images to override model behavior. Our end-to-end IPI pipeline incorporates segmentation-based region selection, adaptive font scaling, and background-aware rendering to conceal prompts from human perception while preserving model interpretability. Using the COCO dataset and GPT-4-turbo, we evaluate 12 adversarial prompt strategies and multiple embedding configurations. The results show that IPI can reliably manipulate the output of the model, with the most effective configuration achieving up to 64\% attack success under stealth constraints. These findings highlight IPI as a practical threat in black-box settings and underscore the need for defenses against multimodal prompt injection.

UniG2U-Bench: Do Unified Models Advance Multimodal Understanding?

arXiv:2603.03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models have recently demonstrated strong generative capabilities, yet whether and when generation improves understanding remains unclear. Existing benchmarks lack a systematic exploration of the specific tasks where generation facilitates understanding. To this end, we introduce UniG2U-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark categorizing generation-to-understanding (G2U) evaluation into 7 regimes and 30 subtasks, requiring varying degrees of implicit or explicit visual transformations. Extensive evaluation of over 30 models reveals three core findings: 1) Unified models generally underperform their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and Generate-then-Answer (GtA) inference typically degrades performance relative to direct inference. 2) Consistent enhancements emerge in spatial intelligence, visual illusions, or multi-round reasoning subtasks, where enhanced spatial and shape perception, as well as multi-step intermediate image states, prove beneficial. 3) Tasks with similar reasoning structures and models sharing architectures exhibit correlated behaviors, suggesting that generation-understanding coupling induces class-consistent inductive biases over tasks, pretraining data, and model architectures. These findings highlight the necessity for more diverse training data and novel paradigms to fully unlock the potential of unified multimodal modeling.

DMTrack: Spatio-Temporal Multimodal Tracking via Dual-Adapter

arXiv:2508.01592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore adapter tuning and introduce a novel dual-adapter architecture for spatio-temporal multimodal tracking, dubbed DMTrack. The key of our DMTrack lies in two simple yet effective modules, including a spatio-temporal modality adapter (STMA) and a progressive modality complementary adapter (PMCA) module. The former, applied to each modality alone, aims to adjust spatio-temporal features extracted from a frozen backbone by self-prompting, which to some extent can bridge the gap between different modalities and thus allows better cross-modality fusion. The latter seeks to facilitate cross-modality prompting progressively with two specially designed pixel-wise shallow and deep adapters. The shallow adapter employs shared parameters between the two modalities, aiming to bridge the information flow between the two modality branches, thereby laying the foundation for following modality fusion, while the deep adapter modulates the preliminarily fused information flow with pixel-wise inner-modal attention and further generates modality-aware prompts through pixel-wise inter-modal attention. With such designs, DMTrack achieves promising spatio-temporal multimodal tracking performance with merely 0.93M trainable parameters. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that DMTrack achieves state-of-the-art results. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/Nightwatch-Fox11/DMTrack.

Nightjar: Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models Serving

arXiv:2512.22420v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load, compute-bound environments due to verification overhead. Existing speculative decoding methods use fixed lengths and cannot adapt to workload changes or decide when to stop speculation. The cost of restarting speculative inference also remains unquantified. Under high load, the benefit of speculation diminishes, while retaining the draft model reduces KV-cache capacity, limiting batch size and degrading throughput. To overcome this, we propose Nightjar, a resource-aware adaptive speculative framework. It first adjusts to the request load by dynamically selecting the optimal speculative length for different batch sizes. Crucially, Nightjar proactively disables speculative decoding when the MAB planner determines that speculation is no longer beneficial, and during the disabled phase, offloads the draft model to the CPU only under GPU memory pressure. This reclaims memory for the KV cache, thereby facilitating larger batch sizes and maximizing overall system throughput. Experiments show that Nightjar achieves average 27.29% higher throughput and up to 20.18% lower latency compared to standard speculative decoding under dynamic request arrival rates in real-time LLM serving scenarios.
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