AdPO: Enhancing the Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models with Preference Optimization

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), such as GPT-4o and LLaVA, have recently witnessed remarkable advancements and are increasingly being deployed in real-world applications. However, inheriting the sensitivity of visual neural networks, LVLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can result in erroneous or malicious outputs. While existing efforts utilize adversarial fine-tuning to enhance robustness, they often suffer from performance degradation on clean inputs. In this paper, we proposes AdPO, a novel adversarial defense strategy for LVLMs based on preference optimization. For the first time, we reframe adversarial training as a preference optimization problem, aiming to enhance the model's preference for generating normal outputs on clean inputs while rejecting the potential misleading outputs for adversarial examples. Notably, AdPO achieves this by solely modifying the image encoder, e.g., CLIP ViT, resulting in superior clean and adversarial performance in a variety of downsream tasks. Considering that training involves large language models (LLMs), the computational cost increases significantly. We validate that training on smaller LVLMs and subsequently transferring to larger models can achieve competitive performance while maintaining efficiency comparable to baseline methods. Our comprehensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed AdPO, which provides a novel perspective for future adversarial defense research.

@article{liu2025_2504.01735,
  title={ AdPO: Enhancing the Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models with Preference Optimization },
  author={ Chaohu Liu and Tianyi Gui and Yu Liu and Linli Xu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.01735},
  year={ 2025 }
}