DIFE Audits CLIP Backdoor Exposure Across Deployment Interfaces
DIFE evaluates backdoored CLIP checkpoints across different deployment interfaces, revealing that native success does not guarantee safety in reuse. The framework shows text-side poisoning enables adversarial exposure in retrieval, reranking, and selection tasks, while visual-only use remains largely unaffected. BadTextTower is introduced to generate strong text-conditioned exposure without compromising visual performance.