LaSM: Layer-wise Scaling Mechanism for Defending Pop-up Attack on GUI Agents

Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong decision-making abilities in screen-based interaction tasks. However, they remain highly vulnerable to pop-up-based environmental injection attacks, where malicious visual elements divert model attention and lead to unsafe or incorrect actions. Existing defense methods either require costly retraining or perform poorly under inductive interference. In this work, we systematically study how such attacks alter the attention behavior of GUI agents and uncover a layer-wise attention divergence pattern between correct and incorrect outputs. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{LaSM}, a \textit{Layer-wise Scaling Mechanism} that selectively amplifies attention and MLP modules in critical layers. LaSM improves the alignment between model saliency and task-relevant regions without additional training. Extensive experiments across 12 types of pop-up perturbations and 4 different model backbones show that LaSM consistently enhances the defense success rate. When combined with prompt-level alerts, LaSM achieves over 98\% robustness even under strong inductive attacks. Our findings reveal that attention misalignment is a core vulnerability in MLLM agents and can be effectively addressed through selective layer-wise modulation.