Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Shuffle Inconsistency

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Shiji, Duan, Ranjie, Wang, Fengxiang, Chen, Chi, Kang, Caixin, Ruan, Shouwei, Tao, Jialing, Chen, YueFeng, Xue, Hui, Wei, Xingxing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Shiji
Duan, Ranjie
Wang, Fengxiang
Chen, Chi
Kang, Caixin
Ruan, Shouwei
Tao, Jialing
Chen, YueFeng
Xue, Hui
Wei, Xingxing
author_facet Zhao, Shiji
Duan, Ranjie
Wang, Fengxiang
Chen, Chi
Kang, Caixin
Ruan, Shouwei
Tao, Jialing
Chen, YueFeng
Xue, Hui
Wei, Xingxing
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance and have been put into practical use in commercial applications, but they still have potential safety mechanism vulnerabilities. Jailbreak attacks are red teaming methods that aim to bypass safety mechanisms and discover MLLMs' potential risks. Existing MLLMs' jailbreak methods often bypass the model's safety mechanism through complex optimization methods or carefully designed image and text prompts. Despite achieving some progress, they have a low attack success rate on commercial closed-source MLLMs. Unlike previous research, we empirically find that there exists a Shuffle Inconsistency between MLLMs' comprehension ability and safety ability for the shuffled harmful instruction. That is, from the perspective of comprehension ability, MLLMs can understand the shuffled harmful text-image instructions well. However, they can be easily bypassed by the shuffled harmful instructions from the perspective of safety ability, leading to harmful responses. Then we innovatively propose a text-image jailbreak attack named SI-Attack. Specifically, to fully utilize the Shuffle Inconsistency and overcome the shuffle randomness, we apply a query-based black-box optimization method to select the most harmful shuffled inputs based on the feedback of the toxic judge model. A series of experiments show that SI-Attack can improve the attack's performance on three benchmarks. In particular, SI-Attack can obviously improve the attack success rate for commercial MLLMs such as GPT-4o or Claude-3.5-Sonnet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04931
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Shuffle Inconsistency
Zhao, Shiji
Duan, Ranjie
Wang, Fengxiang
Chen, Chi
Kang, Caixin
Ruan, Shouwei
Tao, Jialing
Chen, YueFeng
Xue, Hui
Wei, Xingxing
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance and have been put into practical use in commercial applications, but they still have potential safety mechanism vulnerabilities. Jailbreak attacks are red teaming methods that aim to bypass safety mechanisms and discover MLLMs' potential risks. Existing MLLMs' jailbreak methods often bypass the model's safety mechanism through complex optimization methods or carefully designed image and text prompts. Despite achieving some progress, they have a low attack success rate on commercial closed-source MLLMs. Unlike previous research, we empirically find that there exists a Shuffle Inconsistency between MLLMs' comprehension ability and safety ability for the shuffled harmful instruction. That is, from the perspective of comprehension ability, MLLMs can understand the shuffled harmful text-image instructions well. However, they can be easily bypassed by the shuffled harmful instructions from the perspective of safety ability, leading to harmful responses. Then we innovatively propose a text-image jailbreak attack named SI-Attack. Specifically, to fully utilize the Shuffle Inconsistency and overcome the shuffle randomness, we apply a query-based black-box optimization method to select the most harmful shuffled inputs based on the feedback of the toxic judge model. A series of experiments show that SI-Attack can improve the attack's performance on three benchmarks. In particular, SI-Attack can obviously improve the attack success rate for commercial MLLMs such as GPT-4o or Claude-3.5-Sonnet.
title Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Shuffle Inconsistency
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04931