  Multimodal contrastive learning aims to train a general-purpose feature
extractor, such as CLIP, on vast amounts of raw, unlabeled paired image-text
data. This can greatly benefit various complex downstream tasks, including
cross-modal image-text retrieval and image classification. Despite its
promising prospect, the security issue of cross-modal pre-trained encoder has
not been fully explored yet, especially when the pre-trained encoder is
publicly available for commercial use.
  In this work, we propose AdvCLIP, the first attack framework for generating
downstream-agnostic adversarial examples based on cross-modal pre-trained
encoders. AdvCLIP aims to construct a universal adversarial patch for a set of
natural images that can fool all the downstream tasks inheriting the victim
cross-modal pre-trained encoder. To address the challenges of heterogeneity
between different modalities and unknown downstream tasks, we first build a
topological graph structure to capture the relevant positions between target
samples and their neighbors. Then, we design a topology-deviation based
generative adversarial network to generate a universal adversarial patch. By
adding the patch to images, we minimize their embeddings similarity to
different modality and perturb the sample distribution in the feature space,
achieving unviersal non-targeted attacks. Our results demonstrate the excellent
attack performance of AdvCLIP on two types of downstream tasks across eight
datasets. We also tailor three popular defenses to mitigate AdvCLIP,
highlighting the need for new defense mechanisms to defend cross-modal
pre-trained encoders.
