Harnessing LLM to Attack LLM-Guarded Text-to-Image Models
On the map: LLM safety and security → Vision-language and text-to-image safety
Abstract (arXiv)
To prevent Text-to-Image (T2I) models from generating unethical images, people deploy safety filters to block inappropriate drawing prompts. Previous works have employed token replacement to search adversarial prompts that attempt to bypass these filters, but they have become ineffective as nonsensical tokens fail semantic logic checks. In this paper, we approach adversarial prompts from a different perspective. We demonstrate that rephrasing a drawing intent into multiple benign descriptions of individual visual components can obtain an effective adversarial prompt. We propose a LLM-piloted multi-agent method named DACA to automatically complete intended rephrasing. Our method successfully bypasses the safety filters of DALL-E 3 and Midjourney to generate the intended images, achieving success rates of up to 76.7% and 64% in the one-time attack, and 98% and 84% in the re-use attack, respectively. We open-source our code and dataset on [this link](https://github.com/researchcode003/DACA).
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Vision-language and text-to-image safety, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 8 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.
Builds on
8 of 46 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023SneakyPrompt: Jailbreaking Text-to-image Generative Models20 May
- 2023Black Box Adversarial Prompting for Foundation Models8 Feb
Other references · 6
- 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
- 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,304
- 2018TextBugger: Generating Adversarial Text Against Real-world Applicationscited by 376
- 2023Unsafe Diffusion: On the Generation of Unsafe Images and Hateful Memes From Text-To-Image Modelscited by 171
- 2022Adversarial Attacks on Image Generation With Made-Up Wordscited by 29
- 2023An Automated Survey of Generative Artificial Intelligence: Large Language Models, Architectures, Protocols, and Applicationscited by 20
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 4; 2026: 5.
10 papers.
- 2025Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safetycited by 63
- 2025Reason2Attack: Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Models via LLM Reasoningcited by 14
- 2025Mind the Gesture: Evaluating AI Sensitivity to Culturally Offensive Non-Verbal Gesturescited by 4
- 2025PromptSafe: Gated Prompt Tuning for Safe Text-to-Image Generationcited by 2
- 2026The Salami Slicing Threat: Exploiting Cumulative Risks in LLM Systemscited by 1
- 2024Finding a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Combating Adversarial Text-To-Image Prompts with Text Summarizationcited by 0
- 2026PixJail: Self-Evolving Paper-to-Pipeline Reproduction for Text-to-Image Jailbreak Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Multi2AV-Safety: Benchmarking Safety in Multimodal-to-Audio-Video Generationcited by 0
- 2026Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Models Through Cracks: Navigating Heterogeneous Safety Filters via Multi-Agent Debatecited by 0
- 2026RISE: Red-teaming via Iterative Strategy Evolution for Modern Text-to-Image Modelscited by 0
- 2026RISE: Red-teaming via Iterative Strategy Evolution for Modern Text-to-Image Models28 Sep 2026
- 2026Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Models Through Cracks: Navigating Heterogeneous Safety Filters via Multi-Agent Debate1 Sep 2026
- 2026Multi2AV-Safety: Benchmarking Safety in Multimodal-to-Audio-Video Generation27 Aug 2026
- 2026PixJail: Self-Evolving Paper-to-Pipeline Reproduction for Text-to-Image Jailbreak Evaluation23 Jun 2026
- 2026The Salami Slicing Threat: Exploiting Cumulative Risks in LLM Systems13 Apr 2026
- 2025PromptSafe: Gated Prompt Tuning for Safe Text-to-Image Generation2 Aug 2025
- 2025Reason2Attack: Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Models via LLM Reasoning23 Mar 2025
- 2025Mind the Gesture: Evaluating AI Sensitivity to Culturally Offensive Non-Verbal Gestures24 Feb 2025
- 2025Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safety2 Feb 2025
- 2024Finding a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Combating Adversarial Text-To-Image Prompts with Text Summarization15 Dec 2024