Pay Less Attention to Function Words for Free Robustness of Vision-Language Models

To address the trade-off between robustness and performance for robust VLM, we observe that function words could incur vulnerability of VLMs against cross-modal adversarial attacks, and propose Function-word De-Attention (FDA) accordingly to mitigate the impact of function words. Similar to differential amplifiers, our FDA calculates the original and the function-word cross-attention within attention heads, and differentially subtracts the latter from the former for more aligned and robust VLMs. Comprehensive experiments include 2 SOTA baselines under 6 different attacks on 2 downstream tasks, 3 datasets, and 3 models. Overall, our FDA yields an average 18/13/53\% ASR drop with only 0.2/0.3/0.6% performance drops on the 3 tested models on retrieval, and a 90\% ASR drop with a 0.3\% performance gain on visual grounding. We demonstrate the scalability, generalization, and zero-shot performance of FDA experimentally, as well as in-depth ablation studies and analysis. Code will be made publicly available.