As Firm As Their Foundations: Can open-sourced foundation models be used
  to create adversarial examples for downstream tasks?
Anjun Hu Jindong Gu Francesco Pinto Konstantinos Kamnitsas Philip Torr
Foundation models pre-trained on web-scale vision-language data, such as
CLIP, are widely used as cornerstones of powerful machine learning systems.
While pre-training offers clear advantages for downstream learning, it also
endows downstream models with shared adversarial vulnerabilities that can be
easily identified through the open-sourced foundation model. In this work, we
expose such vulnerabilities in CLIP's downstream models and show that
foundation models can serve as a basis for attacking their downstream systems.
In particular, we propose a simple yet effective adversarial attack strategy
termed Patch Representation Misalignment (PRM). Solely based on open-sourced
CLIP vision encoders, this method produces adversaries that simultaneously fool
more than 20 downstream models spanning 4 common vision-language tasks
(semantic segmentation, object detection, image captioning and visual
question-answering). Our findings highlight the concerning safety risks
introduced by the extensive usage of public foundational models in the
development of downstream systems, calling for extra caution in these
scenarios.