Structured Visual Narratives Undermine Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866908988856074240 |
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| author | Tan, Rui Yang Hu, Yujia Lee, Roy Ka-Wei |
| author_facet | Tan, Rui Yang Hu, Yujia Lee, Roy Ka-Wei |
| contents | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) extend text-only LLMs with visual reasoning, but also introduce new safety failure modes under visually grounded instructions. We study comic-template jailbreaks that embed harmful goals inside simple three-panel visual narratives and prompt the model to role-play and "complete the comic." Building on JailbreakBench and JailbreakV, we introduce ComicJailbreak, a comic-based jailbreak benchmark with 1,167 attack instances spanning 10 harm categories and 5 task setups. Across 15 state-of-the-art MLLMs (six commercial and nine open-source), comic-based attacks achieve success rates comparable to strong rule-based jailbreaks and substantially outperform plain-text and random-image baselines, with ensemble success rates exceeding 90% on several commercial models. Then, with the existing defense methodologies, we show that these methods are effective against the harmful comics, they will induce a high refusal rate when prompted with benign prompts. Finally, using automatic judging and targeted human evaluation, we show that current safety evaluators can be unreliable on sensitive but non-harmful content. Our findings highlight the need for safety alignment robust to narrative-driven multimodal jailbreaks. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21697 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Structured Visual Narratives Undermine Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models Tan, Rui Yang Hu, Yujia Lee, Roy Ka-Wei Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence Multimedia Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) extend text-only LLMs with visual reasoning, but also introduce new safety failure modes under visually grounded instructions. We study comic-template jailbreaks that embed harmful goals inside simple three-panel visual narratives and prompt the model to role-play and "complete the comic." Building on JailbreakBench and JailbreakV, we introduce ComicJailbreak, a comic-based jailbreak benchmark with 1,167 attack instances spanning 10 harm categories and 5 task setups. Across 15 state-of-the-art MLLMs (six commercial and nine open-source), comic-based attacks achieve success rates comparable to strong rule-based jailbreaks and substantially outperform plain-text and random-image baselines, with ensemble success rates exceeding 90% on several commercial models. Then, with the existing defense methodologies, we show that these methods are effective against the harmful comics, they will induce a high refusal rate when prompted with benign prompts. Finally, using automatic judging and targeted human evaluation, we show that current safety evaluators can be unreliable on sensitive but non-harmful content. Our findings highlight the need for safety alignment robust to narrative-driven multimodal jailbreaks. |
| title | Structured Visual Narratives Undermine Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence Multimedia |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21697 |