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Huanqian Yan

Huanqian Yan contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

SafeSteer: A Decoding-level Defense Mechanism for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning or inefficient post-hoc interventions, limiting their ability to address novel attacks and involving performance trade-offs. To address the above issues, we explore the inherent safety capabilities within MLLMs and quantify their intrinsic ability to discern harmfulness at decoding stage. We observe that 1) MLLMs can distinguish the harmful and harmless inputs during decoding process, 2) Image-based attacks are more stealthy. Based on these insights, we introduce SafeSteer, a decoding-level defense mechanism for MLLMs. Specifically, it includes a Decoding-Probe, a lightweight probe for detecting and correcting harmful output during decoding, which iteratively steers the decoding process toward safety. Furthermore, a modal semantic alignment vector is integrated to transfer the strong textual safety alignment to the vision modality. Experiments on multiple MLLMs demonstrate that SafeSterr can improve MLLMs' safety by up to 33.40\% without fine-tuning. Notably, it can maintain the effectiveness of MLLMs, ensuring a balance between their helpfulness and harmlessness.

preprint2022arXiv

Improving Adversarial Transferability with Gradient Refining

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are crafted by adding human-imperceptible perturbations to original images. Most existing adversarial attack methods achieve nearly 100% attack success rates under the white-box setting, but only achieve relatively low attack success rates under the black-box setting. To improve the transferability of adversarial examples for the black-box setting, several methods have been proposed, e.g., input diversity, translation-invariant attack, and momentum-based attack. In this paper, we propose a method named Gradient Refining, which can further improve the adversarial transferability by correcting useless gradients introduced by input diversity through multiple transformations. Our method is generally applicable to many gradient-based attack methods combined with input diversity. Extensive experiments are conducted on the ImageNet dataset and our method can achieve an average transfer success rate of 82.07% for three different models under single-model setting, which outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin of 6.0% averagely. And we have applied the proposed method to the competition CVPR 2021 Unrestricted Adversarial Attacks on ImageNet organized by Alibaba and won the second place in attack success rates among 1558 teams.

preprint2022arXiv

Sparse Black-box Video Attack with Reinforcement Learning

Adversarial attacks on video recognition models have been explored recently. However, most existing works treat each video frame equally and ignore their temporal interactions. To overcome this drawback, a few methods try to select some key frames and then perform attacks based on them. Unfortunately, their selection strategy is independent of the attacking step, therefore the resulting performance is limited. Instead, we argue the frame selection phase is closely relevant with the attacking phase. The key frames should be adjusted according to the attacking results. For that, we formulate the black-box video attacks into a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. Specifically, the environment in RL is set as the recognition model, and the agent in RL plays the role of frame selecting. By continuously querying the recognition models and receiving the attacking feedback, the agent gradually adjusts its frame selection strategy and adversarial perturbations become smaller and smaller. We conduct a series of experiments with two mainstream video recognition models: C3D and LRCN on the public UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the adversarial perturbations with efficient query times.