Organizations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China · Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) expand the attack surface of safety-aligned systems by coupling visual perception with text generation. Existing multimodal jailbreak attacks primarily rely on crafted visual content, adversarial perturbations, or image-specific attack strategies, leaving the potential of reusable visual anchors in benign natural images largely unexplored. To address the problem, we introduce MemJack, a memory-augmented multi-agent framework for automated VLM red-teaming with natural images. MemJack combines visual-anchor discovery, visual-semantic camouflage, response evaluation, reflection-guided repair, and dynamic replanning within a closed-loop attack pipeline. Beyond attack generation, MemJack automatically transforms public images into attack anchors, enables the construction of MemJack-Bench, a dataset of over 113,000 interactive multimodal jailbreak trajectories for safety evaluation and defensive alignment. Extensive empirical evaluations across full, unmodified COCO val2017 images demonstrate that MemJack achieves a 71.48% attack success rate (ASR) against Qwen3-VL-Plus, scaling to 90% under extended budgets. Compared with representative multimodal jailbreak baselines under the same natural-image evaluation setting, MemJack achieves the highest ASR while requiring fewer mean rounds to success, demonstrating superior jailbreak effectiveness on VLMs. These results demonstrate that benign natural images can act as transferable jailbreak anchors and reveal substantial vulnerabilities in current safety-aligned VLMs.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of MemJack. The planner maps visual anchors to attack goals; the attacker generates visual-semantic prompts; the evaluator scores responses and triggers reflection or replanning. The memory module persists across images for strategy transfer.
Figure 2: Progressive attack performance. (a) cumulative ASR and moving average on COCO-val. (b) cumulative MRS and moving average on COCO-Jailbreak.
Table 3: MemJack generalization on diverse malicious and benign image datasets.
Victim Model
Type
ASR
MRS
Qwen3-VL-Plus
API
72
5.38
Gemini-3-Flash
API
35
6.62
Mistral-Medium-3
API
82
4.45
Llama-3.2-11B-Vision
Local
68
6.25
Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
Local
53
5.89
GLM-4.6-V-Flash
Local
63
8.33
Table 4: ASR across victim models.
Method
Text Operation
Image Operation
ASR (%)
Avg. Queries
Text-only attacks
GCG [ 30 ]
Suffix optimization
Unchanged
0.62
13.95
AutoDAN-Turbo [ 15 ]
Strategy rewriting
Unchanged
21.25
17.65
PAIR [ 1 ]
Iterative prompt
Unchanged
51.25
17.71
Multimodal attacks
HADES [ 12 ]
Template query
Toxified/typographic image
3.75
19.79
Table 5: Comparison of jailbreak attack baselines on AdvBench-M. Text operation and Image operation make the attacked channel explicit. Avg. Queries is averaged over all completed samples under a 20 victim-query budget.
Table 8
Model
Advbench-M (N=729)
MM-Safetybench (N=260)
SIUO (N=167)
FigStep (N=500)
VLBreakBench (N=916)
JailbreakV (N=100)
COCO-Jailbreak (N=3574)
Qwen3-VL-Plus
0.00%
0.77%
0.00%
0.00%
1.64%
0.00%
61.78%
Mistral-Medium-3
1.10%
10.00%
0.00%
16.20%
27.40%
4.00%
49.69%
Gemini-3-Flash
0.00%
1.54%
0.60%
4.60%
4.37%
5.00%
14.55%
Claude-Haiku-4.5
0.00%
0.77%
0.00%
1.80%
0.22%
0.00%
2.69%
GPT-5-Mini
0.00%
0.77%
0.00%
2.80%
0.22%
0.00%
0.25%
DeepSeek-V3.2
0.14%
0.77%
0.00%
5.00%
6.00%
1.00%
48.07%
Table 8: Comprehensive ASR evaluation results across jailbreak benchmarks
1Yuvion Team, Alibaba Group · Laboratory for Statistical Monitoring and Intelligent Governance of Common Prosperity, School of Statistics and Data Science, Zhejiang Gongshang University