Poison Sample Detection and Trigger Retrieval in Multimodal VLMs - ICIP2025 Grand Challenge

This grand challenge is supported by National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants (project# NS220100007), funded by the Department of Defence Australia.

Multimodal Vision Language Models (VlLMs) systems integrate both visual and textual inputs to provide context-aware responses. These models are rapidly becoming foundational tools across domains like autonomous vehicles, defense systems, medical imaging, and assistive technologies.

However, their deployment introduces a significant threat surface for backdoor attacks — subtle, malicious manipulations of training data that embed hidden triggers. When activated, these triggers can force the model to output incorrect or adversarial responses. Such vulnerabilities raise concerns about trust, transparency, and safety in AI systems.

The ICIP 2025 Grand Challenge seeks to address this problem head-on by inviting the research community to develop methods for detecting poisoned samples and retrieving hidden triggers in multimodal VLMs.

🎯 Challenge Overview

This challenge is structured around three core VLM tasks, each with three independently backdoor-injected models (9 total models):

Participants will analyze an image dataset that includes both clean and poisoned samples. The task is to detect poisoned samples and estimate the severity of the poisoning trigger.

Securing multimodal VLMs is more than a technical problem — it’s a societal necessity, with implications ranging from public safety to the ethical deployment of AI in the real world!

Participants must submit:

  1. The completed ‘ICIP25_poison_sample_detection_results.csv’ results file
  2. A 4-page paper (ICIP format) detailing methods and results

🧪 Evaluation Criteria:

Submissions are reviewed via double-blind review by at least two reviewers.

📅 Timeline

Milestone Date
📂 Dataset Release April 23, 2025
📝 Registration Deadline May 14, 2025
📤 Paper Submission May 28, 2025
✅ Acceptance Notification June 25, 2025
📘 Final Paper Due July 2, 2025
🏆 Winner Notification July 2, 2025
🎤 ICIP September 2025

📜 Rules

  1. Eligibility: Open to all research, academic, and industry participants
  2. Submissions: Manuscript (4 pages) + CSV results file
  3. Dataset Use: Only the provided dataset is permitted
  4. Evaluation: Two-stage scoring (accuracy + severity)
  5. Ethics: No plagiarism; original work only
  6. Team Submissions: Allowed; list all team members
  7. Deadlines: No late or revised submissions
  8. Disqualification: For any rule violations

👥 Organizers

Contact

For questions or clarifications, contact:
📧 jordan.vice@uwa.edu.au

Dataset Information

image_path poisoned (1 or 0) poison_severity (0-3)
ICIP25_VLM_test_images/img_0001.jpg 1 3
ICIP25_VLM_test_images/img_0002.jpg 0 0

📥 Results Template

The results template file can be found at ‘ICIP25_poison_sample_detection_results.csv’