arXiv AI

Jailbreak Connectivity: Towards Diverse, Transferable, and Universal Multimodal Large Language Model Jailbreak

The paper introduces Jailbreak Connectivity (JC), a framework that exploits low‑loss pathways in image space to generate continuous adversarial paths for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). JC produces diverse jailbreak images, uses lightweight surrogate classifiers for cross‑model transfer, and applies a distribution‑level objective to create universal attacks across harmful queries. On the MM‑SafetyBench benchmark, JC achieves high attack success rates—84.01%, 85.77%, and 97.95% on Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct, InternVL3.5‑8B, and Gemma‑3‑12B‑IT respectively—outperforming existing baselines by up to 68.36 percentage points, and improves black‑box attack success on GPT‑5.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro by 24.69 and 27.34 percentage points.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

MLCommons Jailbreak Benchmark v1.0

MLCommons Jailbreak Benchmark v1.0 is a new methodology for assessing how well large language models resist single‑turn, text‑based jailbreak attacks. It evaluates eight open‑weight systems with 264 seed prompts across eleven hazard categories, using the AILuminate Assessment Standard v1.4 to measure the Resilience Gap—the difference in safety performance between baseline and adversarial conditions. The benchmark found that unsafe‑response rates rose from 11.08% to 18.65% under jailbreak conditions, yielding an average Resilience Gap of 7.57% and highlighting variability in attack effectiveness and evaluator reliability.

By Carsten Maple (Victor), Cagatay Yucel (Victor), Isaac Holeman (Victor), Chris Knotz (Victor), Peter Mattson (Victor), James Goel (Victor), Jonathan Petit (Victor), Sean McGregor (Victor), James Ezick (Victor), Abhishek Kumar (Victor), Alicia Parrish (Victor), Murali Emani (Victor), Kashyap Iyer (Victor), Faiza Khan Khattak (Victor), Washington Mbonu (Victor), Daniel Machlab (Victor), Eileen Long (Victor), Shaona Ghosh (Victor), Jibin Varghese (Victor), Roman Lutz (Victor), Andrew Gruen (Victor), Bennett Hillenbrand (Victor), Prabal Gupta (Victor), Mohammed Serrhini (Victor), Dhivya Nagasubramanian (Victor), Aakash Gupta (Victor), Jun (Victor), Lu, Kurt Bollacker, Chang Liu, Jonathan Petit, Cong Chen, Jean-Philippe Monteuuis, Brent Miller, Apurv Verma, Roman Eng, Armstrong Foundjem, Mohammed Serrhini
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Text-Anchored Semantic Perturbations for Transferable Jailbreak Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces TA-SPA, a black‑box jailbreak method for multimodal large language models that generates transferable perturbations in a text‑anchored semantic space. It combines Text‑Anchored Semantic Factorization (TASF) to separate cross‑modal semantic factors from modality‑specific residuals with Semantic‑Preserving Augmentation (SPA) to diversify harmful target anchors while maintaining semantic consistency. Experiments demonstrate strong attack effectiveness and transferability to commercial MLLMs, with competitive performance against representative defenses.

By Wenyun Li, Guiping Cao, Xiangyuan Lan, Zheng Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Learning to Detect Unseen Jailbreak Attacks in Large Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Learning to Detect (LoD), a framework for identifying unseen jailbreak attacks in Large Vision‑Language Models without relying on attack data or hand‑crafted heuristics. LoD extracts layer‑wise safety representations via Multi‑modal Safety Concept Activation Vectors and compresses them into a one‑dimensional anomaly score using a Safety Pattern Auto‑Encoder. Experiments show that LoD achieves state‑of‑the‑art AUROC across diverse unseen attacks on multiple LVLMs while improving efficiency.

By Shuang Liang, Zhihao Xu, Jiaqi Weng, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Xiting Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Divide and Conquer: A Hybrid Strategy Defeats Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces JMLLM, a multimodal jailbreaking approach that targets text, visual, and auditory inputs to expose vulnerabilities in large language models. It also presents TriJail, a new dataset containing jailbreak prompts across all three modalities. Experiments on TriJail and AdvBench show higher attack success rates and lower time overhead compared to existing methods.

By Yanxu Mao, Peipei Liu, Tiehan Cui, Zhaoteng Yan, Congying Liu, Datao You
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Fully Unleashing the Multimodal Attacker: Meta-Adaptive Jailbreaking of Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Meta-Adaptive Multimodal Jailbreaking (MAMJ), a method that jointly optimizes an attack strategy prompt and attacker weights to generate more effective jailbreaks against vision‑language models. Using an LLM‑based critique to refine the strategy and group‑level success‑rate rewards to update the weights, MAMJ achieves high attack success rates on MM‑SafetyBench, outperforming existing baselines by up to 24.1 percentage points. The learned attacker also transfers to unseen models and remains robust against typical defenses, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current VLMs.

By Benlei Cui, Shen Pang, Yuke Wang, Xuemei Dong, Yuwen Zhai, Jingqun Tang, Haiyang Yu, Hui Xue, Longtao Huang, Haiwen Hong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

A Single Suffix to Break Them All: Basin-Aware Jailbreaks for Merged Model Families

The paper investigates safety risks in model merging, showing that even when all constituent models are individually safety‑aligned, merging can expose a jailbreak vulnerability rooted in the pretrained foundation model. It introduces Basin‑Aware Jailbreak (BAJ), a min–max optimization method that generates adversarial suffixes transferable across merged models sharing the same backbone, without needing the exact merging coefficients or checkpoints. Experiments demonstrate BAJ’s high transfer success rates across diverse backbones and merging settings, and its resilience against existing defenses.

By Yu Zhe, Yixin Tan, Junhao Wei, Wang Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Every Picture Tells a Dangerous Story: Memory-Augmented Multi-Agent Jailbreak Attacks on VLMs

The paper introduces MemJack, a memory‑augmented multi‑agent framework that automatically generates jailbreak attacks on Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) using benign natural images as visual anchors. MemJack discovers visual anchors, camouflages them semantically, evaluates responses, repairs via reflection, and replans dynamically, forming a closed‑loop attack pipeline. The authors also create MemJack‑Bench, a dataset of over 113,000 interactive multimodal jailbreak trajectories, and show that MemJack achieves a 71.48% attack success rate against Qwen3‑VL‑Plus, reaching 90% under extended budgets, outperforming other baselines on natural‑image evaluation.

By Jianhao Chen, Haoyang Chen, Hanjie Zhao, Haozhe Liang, Zheng Wang, Tieyun Qian