{"paper":{"title":"Once Poisoned, Arbitrarily Controlled: A Programmable Backdoor in VLMs","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CR"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Gaojie Jin, Lijia Yu, Peng Wu, Tao Lin, Zongxin Liu","submitted_at":"2026-08-11T14:25:29Z","abstract_excerpt":"Existing vision-language model (VLM) backdoors are usually treated as static vulnerabilities: one-to-one and N-to-N attacks bind one or more triggers to a finite set of targets before victim training. This assumption substantially underestimates the threat. We show that a single poisoning phase can implant a programmable backdoor into a VLM, allowing an attacker to choose previously unseen target-caption semantics at inference time and synthesize corresponding stealthy triggers on demand. Unlike fixed-mapping attacks, the proposed any-to-any caption-control paradigm decouples post-training tar"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.10959","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.10959/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}