Jailbreak Connectivity: Towards Diverse, Transferable, and Universal Multimodal Large Language Model Jailbreak

Summary

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to visual jailbreak attacks that bypass safety safeguards. Existing methods typically optimize isolated adversarial examples, limiting attack diversity, transferability, and generalization. We propose Jailbreak Connectivity (JC), a framework based on the observation that effective adversarial inputs can be connected through low-loss regions in image space. JC optimizes continuous adversarial paths: path sampling yields diverse jailbreak images, lightweight surrogate classifiers guide cross-model transfer, and a distribution-level objective enables universal attacks across harmful queries. On MM-SafetyBench, JC achieves average attack success rates of 84.01%, 85.77%, and 97.95% on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, InternVL3.5-8B, and Gemma-3-12B-IT, respectively, exceeding the strongest baselines by up to 68.36 percentage points. In black-box evaluations, JC improves attack success rates over FigStep by 24.69 and 27.34 percentage points on GPT-5.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, respectively. These findings reveal structured vulnerabilities in MLLM safety alignment and inform more comprehensive security evaluation.