ML Security PapersJailbreaks on Vision Language Model via Multimodal Reasoning
Aarush Noheria, Yuguang Yao · Novi High School · Michigan State University
Dual-strategy VLM jailbreak combining Chain-of-Thought prompt manipulation and ReAct-driven adversarial image noising to evade safety filters
Vision-language models (VLMs) have become central to tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, and text-to-image generation. However, their outputs are highly sensitive to prompt variations, which can reveal vulnerabilities in safety alignment. In this work, we present a jailbreak framework that exploits post-training Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to construct stealthy prompts capable of bypassing safety filters. To further increase attack success rates (ASR), we propose a ReAct-driven adaptive noising mechanism that iteratively perturbs input images based on model feedback. This approach leverages the ReAct paradigm to refine adversarial noise in regions most likely to activate safety defenses, thereby enhancing stealth and evasion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed dual-strategy significantly improves ASR while maintaining naturalness in both text and visual domains.