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Sequential Comics for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Structured Visual Storytelling

Authors: Deyue Zhang, Dongdong Yang, Junjie Mu, Quancheng Zou, Zonghao Ying, Wenzhuo Xu, Zhao Liu, Xuan Wang, Xiangzheng Zhang

Published: 2025-10-16

arXiv ID: 2510.15068v1

Added to Library: 2025-10-20 04:01 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks exploiting cross-modal vulnerabilities. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages sequential comic-style visual narratives to circumvent safety alignments in state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our method decomposes malicious queries into visually innocuous storytelling elements using an auxiliary LLM, generates corresponding image sequences through diffusion models, and exploits the models' reliance on narrative coherence to elicit harmful outputs. Extensive experiments on harmful textual queries from established safety benchmarks show that our approach achieves an average attack success rate of 83.5\%, surpassing prior state-of-the-art by 46\%. Compared with existing visual jailbreak methods, our sequential narrative strategy demonstrates superior effectiveness across diverse categories of harmful content. We further analyze attack patterns, uncover key vulnerability factors in multimodal safety mechanisms, and evaluate the limitations of current defense strategies against narrative-driven attacks, revealing significant gaps in existing protections.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of Sequential Comic Jailbreak (SCJ) method that exploits narrative comprehension in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to bypass safety mechanisms.
  • Demonstrated attack success rate of 83.5%, significantly outperforming previous visual jailbreak methods by 46%.
  • The attack framework decomposes harmful queries into visually innocuous elements, generating comic-style narratives that are presented sequentially to MLLMs.
  • Extensive evaluations reveal vulnerabilities in current multimodal safety mechanisms, particularly in addressing narrative-driven attacks.
  • Highlights the pressing need for narrative-aware safety protocols in multimodal AI systems, as existing defenses fail against SCJ.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper presents significant advancements in understanding and exploiting vulnerabilities in multimodal large language models using creative, narrative-based attack strategies. The findings reveal the limitations of current safety measures and call for enhanced protective measures in these systems, emphasizing the necessity of improving security frameworks in AI applications that utilize MLLMs.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

For AI security researchers, this paper is critically relevant as it addresses emerging vulnerabilities in MLLMs and proposes novel methods for attack that leverage narrative reasoning. Understanding these attack vectors is essential for developing robust defense mechanisms and improving the safety of AI systems, particularly as they become more integrated into sensitive applications, where security is paramount.

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