SurrogatePrompt: Bypassing the Safety Filter of Text-To-Image Models via Substitution

Advanced text-to-image models such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney possess the capacity to generate highly realistic images, raising significant concerns regarding the potential proliferation of unsafe content. This includes adult, violent, or deceptive imagery of political figures. Despite claims of rigorous safety mechanisms implemented in these models to restrict the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, we successfully devise and exhibit the first prompt attacks on Midjourney, resulting in the production of abundant photorealistic NSFW images. We reveal the fundamental principles of such prompt attacks and suggest strategically substituting high-risk sections within a suspect prompt to evade closed-source safety measures. Our novel framework, SurrogatePrompt, systematically generates attack prompts, utilizing large language models, image-to-text, and image-to-image modules to automate attack prompt creation at scale. Evaluation results disclose an 88% success rate in bypassing Midjourney's proprietary safety filter with our attack prompts, leading to the generation of counterfeit images depicting political figures in violent scenarios. Both subjective and objective assessments validate that the images generated from our attack prompts present considerable safety hazards.

Masked Diffusion Models are Fast Learners

Diffusion models have emerged as the de-facto technique for image generation, yet they entail significant computational overhead, hindering the technique's broader application in the research community. We propose a prior-based denoising training framework, the first to incorporate the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm into the diffusion model training process, which substantially improves training efficiency and shows potential in facilitating various downstream tasks. Our approach centers on masking a high proportion (e.g., up to 90%) of the input image and employing masked score matching to denoise the visible areas, thereby guiding the diffusion model to learn more salient features from training data as prior knowledge. By utilizing this masked learning process in a pre-training stage, we efficiently train the ViT-based diffusion model on CelebA-HQ 256x256 in the pixel space, achieving a 4x acceleration and enhancing the quality of generated images compared to DDPM. Moreover, our masked pre-training technique is universally applicable to various diffusion models that directly generate images in the pixel space and facilitates learning pre-trained models with excellent generalizability: a diffusion model pre-trained on VGGFace2 attains a 46% quality improvement through fine-tuning with merely 10% local data. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiachenlei/maskdm.

Masked Autoencoders for Egocentric Video Understanding @ Ego4D Challenge 2022

In this report, we present our approach and empirical results of applying masked autoencoders in two egocentric video understanding tasks, namely, Object State Change Classification and PNR Temporal Localization, of Ego4D Challenge 2022. As team TheSSVL, we ranked 2nd place in both tasks. Our code will be made available.