Vulnerabilities Unveiled: Adversarially Attacking a Multimodal Vision Langauge Model for Pathology Imaging

In the dynamic landscape of medical artificial intelligence, this study explores the vulnerabilities of the Pathology Language-Image Pretraining (PLIP) model, a Vision Language Foundation model, under targeted adversarial conditions. Leveraging the Kather Colon dataset with 7,180 H&E images across nine tissue types, our investigation employs Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversarial attacks to intentionally induce misclassifications. The outcomes reveal a 100% success rate in manipulating PLIP's predictions, underscoring its susceptibility to adversarial perturbations. The qualitative analysis of adversarial examples delves into the interpretability challenges, shedding light on nuanced changes in predictions induced by adversarial manipulations. These findings contribute crucial insights into the interpretability, domain adaptation, and trustworthiness of Vision Language Models in medical imaging. The study emphasizes the pressing need for robust defenses to ensure the reliability of AI models.