Automatic Red Teaming for Implicit Vulnerabilities of Text-to-Image Models

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Red-teaming Text-to-Image (T2I) models is essential for safe deployment, yet it remains particularly challenging against implicit adversarial prompts. Unlike explicit adversarial prompts that can be readily identified and blocked, implicit ones are much harder to detect: the prompts appear benign on the text surface yet still lead to inappropriate visual content. To address this, we propose Adversarial Probing for Implicit VulnErabilities (AdvPIE), a multimodal agentic framework to expose implicit vulnerabilities without requiring access to the parameters of target models. AdvPIE adopts a policy agent to generate and refine implicit adversarial prompts based on the feedback from a judge agent. To construct informative feedback, the judge agent provides modality-specific safety evaluation at both global and relative levels across iterations. To effectively leverage the feedback, we propose a novel Cumulative Adversarial Decoding strategy for the policy agent, which dynamically reweights token distributions to favor tokens that lead to more harmful images while preserving sampling diversity. Extensive experiments on standard and safety-aligned T2I models show that AdvPIE1 effectively uncovers implicit vulnerabilities, outperforming various baseline methods.