Utilizing Jailbreak Probability to Attack and Safeguard Multimodal LLMs (2503.06989v1)

Abstract: Recently, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have demonstrated their superior ability in understanding multimodal contents. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which exploit weaknesses in their safety alignment to generate harmful responses. Previous studies categorize jailbreaks as successful or failed based on whether responses contain malicious content. However, given the stochastic nature of MLLM responses, this binary classification of an input's ability to jailbreak MLLMs is inappropriate. Derived from this viewpoint, we introduce jailbreak probability to quantify the jailbreak potential of an input, which represents the likelihood that MLLMs generated a malicious response when prompted with this input. We approximate this probability through multiple queries to MLLMs. After modeling the relationship between input hidden states and their corresponding jailbreak probability using Jailbreak Probability Prediction Network (JPPN), we use continuous jailbreak probability for optimization. Specifically, we propose Jailbreak-Probability-based Attack (JPA) that optimizes adversarial perturbations on inputs to maximize jailbreak probability. To counteract attacks, we also propose two defensive methods: Jailbreak-Probability-based Finetuning (JPF) and Jailbreak-Probability-based Defensive Noise (JPDN), which minimizes jailbreak probability in the MLLM parameters and input space, respectively. Extensive experiments show that (1) JPA yields improvements (up to 28.38\%) under both white and black box settings compared to previous methods with small perturbation bounds and few iterations. (2) JPF and JPDN significantly reduce jailbreaks by at most over 60\%. Both of the above results demonstrate the significance of introducing jailbreak probability to make nuanced distinctions among input jailbreak abilities.