Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2026

Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited remarkable advancements in integrating different modalities, excelling in complex understanding and generation tasks. Despite their success, MLLMs remain vulnerable to conversational adversarial inputs. In this paper, we systematically study gaslighting negation attacks—a phenomenon where models, despite initially providing correct answers, are persuaded by user-provided negations to reverse their outputs, often fabricating justifications. We conduct extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs across diverse benchmarks and observe substantial performance drops when negation is introduced. Notably, we introduce the first benchmark GaslightingBench, specifically designed to evaluate the vulnerability of MLLMs to negation arguments. GaslightingBench consists of multiple-choice questions curated from existing datasets, along with generated negation prompts across 20 diverse categories. Throughout extensive evaluation, we find that proprietary models such as Gemini-1.5-flash and GPT-4o demonstrate better resilience compared to open-source counterparts like Qwen2-VL and LLaVA, though even advanced reasoning-oriented models like Gemini-2.5-Pro remain susceptible. Our category-level analysis further shows that subjective or socially nuanced domains (e.g., Social Relation, Image Emotion) are especially fragile, while more objective domains (e.g., Geography) exhibit relatively smaller but still notable drops. Overall, all evaluated MLLMs struggle to maintain logical consistency under gaslighting negation attack. These findings highlight a fundamental robustness gap and provide insights for developing more reliable and trustworthy multimodal AI systems. Project website: https://yxg1005.github.io/GaslightingNegationAttacks.

Keywords

Multimodal Large Language Models, Gaslighting Negation Attack, Evaluation

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

ICMR '26: Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 16-19

First Page

2041

Last Page

2049

ISBN

9798400726170

Identifier

10.1145/3805622.3810624

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3805622.3810624

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