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
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
arXiv:2608. 01043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report a counter-intuitive interaction between image inputs and existing black-box defenses on Vision--Language Models (VLMs): pairing an encoded jailbreak prompt with an unrelated decoy image can sharply lower attack success rate (ASR).
By Haoyu Zhang, Xiangchen Guan, Shibo Zheng, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv:2602.08136v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are now a core part of modern AI. Recent work proposed several visual jailbreak attacks using single/ holistic...
By Md Rafi Ur Rashid, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Shagufta Mehnaz
arXiv:2607. 17779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models have achieved remarkable progress in synthesizing high-quality visual content, yet they remain vulnerable to adversarial misuse, particularly in generating Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) images.
By Dongdong Yang, Deyue Zhang, Zhao Liu, Zonghao Ying, Wenzhuo Xu, Jiankai Jin, Xiangzheng Zhang, Quanchen Zou
arXiv:2607. 26574v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety classifiers ("guards") are the dominant black-box defense for vision-language models, yet they judge an input's surface form, not its meaning: a harmful request re-encoded as set theory, formal logic, a rare language, code, or an image of text slips past a guard that would block it in plain language -- the decode gap.
By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Zijian Xiao, Xiangchen Guan, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv:2606. 03647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately evaluating adversarial robustness is a longstanding challenge.
By Vincent Limbach, Jonas Dornbusch, David L\"udke, Stephan G\"unnemann, Leo Schwinn
arXiv:2503.06989v5 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated their superior ability in understanding multimodal content. However, the...
By Wenzhuo Xu, Zhipeng Wei, Xiongtao Sun, Zonghao Ying, Deyue Zhang, Dongdong Yang, Xiangzheng Zhang, Quanchen Zou
arXiv:2605. 10764v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies show that gradient-based universal image jailbreaks on vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit little or no cross-model transferability, casting doubt on the feasibility of transferable multimodal jailbreaks.
By Mengqi He, Xinyu Tian, Xin Shen, Shu Zou, Jinhong Ni, Zhaoyuan Yang, Weikang Li, Xuesong Li, Jing Zhang
The paper presents a preprocessor that recovers and decodes encoded content in vision‑language models to close the decode gap that allows harmful requests to bypass safety classifiers. Evaluated against eleven encoding attacks, the preprocessor raises block rates from 0 % to 67‑90 % but also increases benign over‑refusal, and no configuration achieves an ensemble attack‑success rate below 40 % while keeping benign over‑refusal under 70 %. The study shows that closing one encoding channel merely relocates success rather than eliminating it, highlighting the limits of recovery‑based defenses.
By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Hanwen Liu, Yi Feng, Haowen Xu, Xiangchen Guan, Yang Chen, Zijian Xiao, Xiao Luo, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv:2607. 26574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety classifiers ("guards") are the dominant black-box defense for vision-language models, yet a guard judges an input's surface form, not its meaning: a harmful request re-encoded as set theory, formal logic, a classical language, code, or text rendered inside an image slips past a guard that would block it in plain language - the decode gap.
By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Yi Feng, Xiao Luo, Zijian Xiao, Haowen Xu, Xiangchen Guan, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv:2609.14258v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreaks that distribute harmful intent across text and images, making unimodal safety mechanisms...
By Mohd Azfar, Izhar Dad Khan