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JailBound: Jailbreaking Internal Safety Boundaries of Vision-Language Models

Authors: Jiaxin Song, Yixu Wang, Jie Li, Rui Yu, Yan Teng, Xingjun Ma, Yingchun Wang

Published: 2025-05-26

arXiv ID: 2505.19610v2

Added to Library: 2025-06-02 01:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive performance, yet the integration of powerful vision encoders has significantly broadened their attack surface, rendering them increasingly susceptible to jailbreak attacks. However, lacking well-defined attack objectives, existing jailbreak methods often struggle with gradient-based strategies prone to local optima and lacking precise directional guidance, and typically decouple visual and textual modalities, thereby limiting their effectiveness by neglecting crucial cross-modal interactions. Inspired by the Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK) framework, we posit that VLMs encode safety-relevant information within their internal fusion-layer representations, revealing an implicit safety decision boundary in the latent space. This motivates exploiting boundary to steer model behavior. Accordingly, we propose JailBound, a novel latent space jailbreak framework comprising two stages: (1) Safety Boundary Probing, which addresses the guidance issue by approximating decision boundary within fusion layer's latent space, thereby identifying optimal perturbation directions towards the target region; and (2) Safety Boundary Crossing, which overcomes the limitations of decoupled approaches by jointly optimizing adversarial perturbations across both image and text inputs. This latter stage employs an innovative mechanism to steer the model's internal state towards policy-violating outputs while maintaining cross-modal semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on six diverse VLMs demonstrate JailBound's efficacy, achieves 94.32% white-box and 67.28% black-box attack success averagely, which are 6.17% and 21.13% higher than SOTA methods, respectively. Our findings expose a overlooked safety risk in VLMs and highlight the urgent need for more robust defenses. Warning: This paper contains potentially sensitive, harmful and offensive content.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of JailBound, a novel jailbreak framework targeting safety vulnerabilities in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through latent knowledge exploitation.
  • The framework employs a two-stage approach: Safety Boundary Probing to identify decision boundaries in latent space and Safety Boundary Crossing for joint adversarial perturbation optimization across visual and textual modalities.
  • Extensive experiments show JailBound achieving 94.32% white-box and 67.28% black-box attack success rates, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art methods by substantial margins.
  • Findings demonstrate the overlooked safety risks in VLMs and the urgent need for improved defenses against such vulnerabilities.
  • The work highlights the critical need for better safety alignment mechanisms in multimodal AI systems. Reformulations of how safety boundaries are managed in latent spaces could inform future defensive strategies.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

The paper underscores the growing security challenges posed by advanced Vision-Language Models, particularly how their internal safety mechanisms are vulnerable to novel jailbreak techniques. JailBound represents a significant advancement in understanding and exploiting these vulnerabilities, thereby driving forward the safety and security agenda in AI-enabled systems. Its findings emphasize the necessity for more robust frameworks to safeguard AI against adversarial attacks.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is essential for AI security researchers as it directly addresses the vulnerabilities present in modern VLMs, a rapidly expanding area in AI. The introduction of JailBound not only elucidates the mechanisms underlying jailbreak attacks but also paves the way for developing more effective countermeasures against such threats. The empirical evidence provided regarding VLMs' susceptibility to attacks can inform future research aimed at enhancing safety and robustness in AI applications.

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