PBI-Attack: Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for Toxicity Maximization

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission124 Authors

Abstract:

Understanding the vulnerabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to jailbreak attacks is essential for their responsible real-world deployment. Most previous work requires access to model gradients, or is based on human knowledge (prompt engineering) to complete jailbreak, and they hardly consider the interaction of images and text, resulting in inability to jailbreak in black box scenarios or poor performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for toxicity maximization, referred to as PBI-Attack. Our method begins by extracting malicious features from a harmful corpus using an alternative LVLM and embedding these features into a benign image as prior information. Subsequently, we enhance these features through bidirectional cross-modal interaction optimization, which iteratively optimizes the bimodal perturbations in an alternating manner through greedy search, aiming to maximize the toxicity of the generated response. The toxicity level is quantified using a well-trained evaluation model. Experiments demonstrate that PBI-Attack outperforms previous state-of-the-art jailbreak methods, achieving an average attack success rate of 92.5\% across three open-source LVLMs and around 67.3\% on three closed-source LVLMs.
Disclaimer: This paper contains potentially disturbing and offensive content.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Research Area Keywords: Jailbreak attack, Adversarial attack, LVLMs

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Reproduction study, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 124