Paper Detail

Beyond the Verdict: Evidence-Aligned Evaluation of Visual Prompt-Injection Guardrails

Suyoung Lee, Myungsub Choi

arxiv Score 11.8

Published 2026-09-02 · First seen 2026-09-09

General AI

Abstract

Verdict-only evaluation does not reveal whether a vision-language model (VLM) used the visual evidence that should support its decision. We study this problem in web-agent guardrails, where a VLM judges whether on-screen text conflicts with a user instruction. We introduce Mind2Web-Injection, a benchmark of 9,954 instruction-screenshot pairs with instruction-relative labels, pixel-exact evidence boxes, and matched image-side counterfactuals. Across six VLMs, two models with nearly identical average precision differ ninefold in Evidence-Aligned Detection (EAD), the fraction of attacks both detected and correctly localized. To test whether a verdict depends on the command cited as evidence, we replace the instruction with one that endorses that command. Qwen3-VL-32B, the strongest open-weight localizer, returns aligned in only 58.7% of cases, whereas GPT-5.6-luna does so in 99.9%. To diagnose these failures, we propose two training-free interventions. ReadGate improves grounding without changing verdicts, while CmdCompare tests whether explicit instruction-command comparison resolves instruction-side inconsistency. These results motivate reporting verdict correctness, evidence localization, and counterfactual responsiveness separately.

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BibTeX

@article{lee2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond the Verdict: Evidence-Aligned Evaluation of Visual Prompt-Injection Guardrails},
  author = {Suyoung Lee and Myungsub Choi},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Verdict-only evaluation does not reveal whether a vision-language model (VLM) used the visual evidence that should support its decision. We study this problem in web-agent guardrails, where a VLM judges whether on-screen text conflicts with a user instruction. We introduce Mind2Web-Injection, a benchmark of 9,954 instruction-screenshot pairs with instruction-relative labels, pixel-exact evidence boxes, and matched image-side counterfactuals. Across six VLMs, two models with nearly identical aver},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05535},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2609.05535},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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