Xurui Song
Author directory2026
Visual Attention Faithfulness in Vision-Language Models is Heterogeneous
Xurui Song | Weishi Wang | Zhongqi Yue | Kuluhan Binici | Tao Bai | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier | Jun Luo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xurui Song | Weishi Wang | Zhongqi Yue | Kuluhan Binici | Tao Bai | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier | Jun Luo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Whether attention weights faithfully reflect model reasoning has been actively debated in NLP, yet this question remains largely unexplored for the visual modality in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We address this gap through causal perturbation analysis on current VLMs, evaluating both the comprehensiveness and sufficiency gap of attention-ranked visual tokens. Our analysis reveals that visual attention faithfulness is heterogeneous, manifesting in three distinct processing modes: *Faithful-Sufficient*, where top-k attention tokens are both necessary and sufficient for prediction; *Faithful-Distributed*, where they are necessary but broader visual context remains required; and *Non-Focal*, where no localized attention region is individually necessary while visual information remains an essential trigger for prediction. Furthermore, human-annotated ground-truth regions satisfy comprehensiveness in only ∼60% of cases compared with model attention rankings, revealing systematic divergence between model visual reliance and human intuition. We demonstrate these patterns across both general VQA on VQAv2 and document tasks on VRDU and ChartQA, showing that visual attention faithfulness varies systematically with processing demands and model architectures rather than being uniformly faithful or unfaithful.
2025
Dagger Behind Smile: Fool LLMs with a Happy Ending Story
Xurui Song | Zhixin Xie | Shuo Huai | Jiayi Kong | Jun Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xurui Song | Zhixin Xie | Shuo Huai | Jiayi Kong | Jun Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The wide adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has attracted significant attention from jailbreak attacks, where adversarial prompts crafted through optimization or manual design exploit LLMs to generate malicious contents. However, optimization-based attacks have limited efficiency and transferability, while existing manual designs are either easily detectable or demand intricate interactions with LLMs. In this paper, we first point out a novel perspective for jailbreak attacks: LLMs are more responsive to positive prompts. Based on this, we deploy Happy Ending Attack (HEA) to wrap up a malicious request in a scenario template involving a positive prompt formed mainly via a happy \ ending, it thus fools LLMs into jailbreaking either immediately or at a follow-up malicious request. This has made HEA both efficient and effective, as it requires only up to two turns to fully jailbreak LLMs. Extensive experiments show that our HEA can successfully jailbreak on state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, Llama3-70b, Gemini-pro, and achieves 88.79% attack success rate on average. We also provide quantitative explanations for the success of HEA.