Beyond Static Cues: Unified Dynamic Detection of MLLM Backdoors via Dual-Flow Trajectory Analysis

Yinzhen Huang, Jiahe Xie, Yitong Sun, Ruochen Zhang, Xingxing Wei

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains, yet their susceptibility to backdoor attacks remains a formidable challenge. While existing defenses have evolved from visual-centric patch cues to unsupervised internal attention statistics, they are fundamentally constrained by a reliance on static snapshots and attack-specific heuristics. Given the intricate interplay between dual modalities, the vast design space for multimodal triggers allows diverse threats, such as textual injections, sub-perceptual noises, and coordinated cross-modal triggers, to easily circumvent such rigid priors, particularly when attack types are unknown in real-world applications. In this paper, we rethink backdoor detection by shifting the diagnostic paradigm from static observations to dynamic output evolution. We observe that a successful attack inevitably hijacks the model's decoding trajectory, skewing internal modal contributions during generation while maintaining an abnormal output invariance despite input perturbations. To capture this behavior, we propose EVO-Detect, a unified detection framework that monitors the dynamic evolution of internal…