Huan Zhang

Organizers Of QueerInAI, Anaelia Ovalle, Arjun Subramonian et al. · allen-ai, cmu

We present Queer in AI as a case study for community-led participatory design in AI. We examine how participatory design and intersectional tenets started and shaped this community's programs over the years. We discuss different challenges that emerged in the process, look at ways this organization has fallen short of operationalizing participatory and intersectional principles, and then assess the organization's impact. Queer in AI provides important lessons and insights for practitioners and theorists of participatory methods broadly through its rejection of hierarchy in favor of decentralization, success at building aid and programs by and for the queer community, and effort to change actors and institutions outside of the queer community. Finally, we theorize how communities like Queer in AI contribute to the participatory design in AI more broadly by fostering cultures of participation in AI, welcoming and empowering marginalized participants, critiquing poor or exploitative participatory practices, and bringing participation to institutions outside of individual research projects. Queer in AI's work serves as a case study of grassroots activism and participatory methods within AI, demonstrating the potential of community-led participatory methods and intersectional praxis, while also providing challenges, case studies, and nuanced insights to researchers developing and using participatory methods.

Zhaoyi Liu, Huan Zhang

Self-supervised learning (SSL) vision encoders learn high-quality image representations and thus have become a vital part of developing vision modality of large vision language models (LVLMs). Due to the high cost of training such encoders, pre-trained encoders are widely shared and deployed into many LVLMs, which are security-critical or bear societal significance. Under this practical scenario, we reveal a new backdoor threat that significant visual hallucinations can be induced into these LVLMs by merely compromising vision encoders. Because of the sharing and reuse of these encoders, many downstream LVLMs may inherit backdoor behaviors from encoders, leading to widespread backdoors. In this work, we propose BadVision, the first method to exploit this vulnerability in SSL vision encoders for LVLMs with novel trigger optimization and backdoor learning techniques. We evaluate BadVision on two types of SSL encoders and LVLMs across eight benchmarks. We show that BadVision effectively drives the LVLMs to attacker-chosen hallucination with over 99% attack success rate, causing a 77.6% relative visual understanding error while maintaining the stealthiness. SoTA backdoor detection methods cannot detect our attack effectively.