Scale Fail: How Downsampling Becomes an Adversarial Backdoor for VLMs
Opening — Why this matters now If 2023–2025 was the era of “LLMs eating the world,” then 2026 is shaping up to be the year we learn what’s eating them. As multimodal AI quietly embeds itself into workflows—from underwriting to autonomous inspection—an unglamorous preprocessing step turns out to be a remarkably sharp attack surface: image scaling. ...