# Sequential Comics for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Structured Visual Storytelling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15068/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 39 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)
- LLM safety and security / [Vision-language and text-to-image safety](https://mlsanity.com/safety/vision-language-and-text-to-image-safety/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03693/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04451/) (2023)
- [Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02119/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [MM-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17600/) (2023)
- [Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04295/) (2024)
- [ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11753/) (2024)
- [An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17247/) (2024)
- [Images are Achilles' Heel of Alignment: Exploiting Visual Vulnerabilities for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09792/) (2024)
- [Jailbreak Vision Language Models via Bi-Modal Adversarial Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04031/) (2024)
- [SafeBench: A Safety Evaluation Framework for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18927/) (2024)
- [VLATTACK: Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Tasks via Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04655/) (2023)
- [Reasoning-Augmented Conversation for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11054/) (2025)
- [One Perturbation is Enough: On Generating Universal Adversarial Perturbations against Vision-Language Pre-training Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05491/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Structured Visual Narratives Undermine Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21697/) (2026)
- [Safe Alone, Unsafe Together: Safeguarding Against Implicit Toxicity When Benign Images Combine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00576/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks exploiting cross-modal vulnerabilities. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages sequential comic-style visual narratives to circumvent safety alignments in state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our method decomposes malicious queries into visually innocuous storytelling elements using an auxiliary LLM, generates corresponding image sequences through diffusion models, and exploits the models' reliance on narrative coherence to elicit harmful outputs. Extensive experiments on harmful textual queries from established safety benchmarks show that our approach achieves an average attack success rate of 83.5%, surpassing prior state-of-the-art by 46%. Compared with existing visual jailbreak methods, our sequential narrative strategy demonstrates superior effectiveness across diverse categories of harmful content. We further analyze attack patterns, uncover key vulnerability factors in multimodal safety mechanisms, and evaluate the limitations of current defense strategies against narrative-driven attacks, revealing significant gaps in existing protections.