Every Picture Tells a Dangerous Story: Memory-Augmented Multi-Agent Jailbreak Attacks on VLMs

arXiv cs.AI / 4/15/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper argues that the growing capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) have expanded their adversarial attack surface beyond superficial pixel/typographic attacks, leaving natural-image semantic vulnerabilities underexplored.
  • It introduces MemJack, a memory-augmented multi-agent jailbreak framework that maps visual entities to malicious intents, crafts adversarial prompts using multi-angle visual-semantic camouflage, and applies an Iterative Nullspace Projection filter to evade latent-space refusal mechanisms.
  • MemJack maintains coherent multi-turn jailbreak interactions across different images by storing and transferring successful strategies in a persistent multimodal experience memory, improving generalization to new images.
  • Experiments on full, unmodified COCO val2017 images report a 71.48% attack success rate against Qwen3-VL-Plus, reaching about 90% with extended compute budgets.
  • To support defense research, the authors plan to release MemJack-Bench, a dataset of 113,000+ interactive multimodal jailbreak trajectories for studying and aligning more robust VLMs.

Abstract

The rapid evolution of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has catalyzed unprecedented capabilities in artificial intelligence; however, this continuous modal expansion has inadvertently exposed a vastly broadened and unconstrained adversarial attack surface. Current multimodal jailbreak strategies primarily focus on surface-level pixel perturbations and typographic attacks or harmful images; however, they fail to engage with the complex semantic structures intrinsic to visual data. This leaves the vast semantic attack surface of original, natural images largely unscrutinized. Driven by the need to expose these deep-seated semantic vulnerabilities, we introduce \textbf{MemJack}, a \textbf{MEM}ory-augmented multi-agent \textbf{JA}ilbreak atta\textbf{CK} framework that explicitly leverages visual semantics to orchestrate automated jailbreak attacks. MemJack employs coordinated multi-agent cooperation to dynamically map visual entities to malicious intents, generate adversarial prompts via multi-angle visual-semantic camouflage, and utilize an Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) geometric filter to bypass premature latent space refusals. By accumulating and transferring successful strategies through a persistent Multimodal Experience Memory, MemJack maintains highly coherent extended multi-turn jailbreak attack interactions across different images, thereby improving the attack success rate (ASR) on new images. Extensive empirical evaluations across full, unmodified COCO val2017 images demonstrate that MemJack achieves a 71.48\% ASR against Qwen3-VL-Plus, scaling to 90\% under extended budgets. Furthermore, to catalyze future defensive alignment research, we will release \textbf{MemJack-Bench}, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 113,000 interactive multimodal jailbreak attack trajectories, establishing a vital foundation for developing inherently robust VLMs.