# DefenSee: Dissecting Threat from Sight and Text -- A Multi-View Defensive Pipeline for Multi-modal Jailbreaks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01185 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01185/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision-language and text-to-image safety, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 22 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- 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, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04451/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Visual Adversarial Examples Jailbreak Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13213/) (2023)
- [Are aligned neural networks adversarially aligned?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15447/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [MM-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17600/) (2023)
- [Jailbreak in pieces: Compositional Adversarial Attacks on Multi-Modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14539/) (2023)
- [Images are Achilles' Heel of Alignment: Exploiting Visual Vulnerabilities for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09792/) (2024)
- [AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09513/) (2024)
- [Eyes Closed, Safety On: Protecting Multimodal LLMs via Image-to-Text Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09572/) (2024)
- [MLLM-Protector: Ensuring MLLM's Safety without Hurting Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02906/) (2024)
- [Jailbreaking GPT-4V via Self-Adversarial Attacks with System Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09127/) (2023)
- [Arondight: Red Teaming Large Vision Language Models with Auto-generated Multi-modal Jailbreak Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15050/) (2024)
- [Survey of Adversarial Robustness in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13962/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Attack Ensembles Expose a Safety-Utility Trade-off in Black-Box Guard Defenses Against Encoded VLM Jailbreaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26574/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), capable of processing text, images, and audio, have been widely adopted in various AI applications. However, recent MLLMs integrating images and text remain highly vulnerable to coordinated jailbreaks. Existing defenses primarily focus on the text, lacking robust multi-modal protection. As a result, studies indicate that MLLMs are more susceptible to malicious or unsafe instructions, unlike their text-only counterparts. In this paper, we proposed DefenSee, a robust and lightweight multi-modal black-box defense technique that leverages image variants transcription and cross-modal consistency checks, mimicking human judgment. Experiments on popular multi-modal jailbreak and benign datasets show that DefenSee consistently enhances MLLM robustness while better preserving performance on benign tasks compared to SOTA defenses. It reduces the ASR of jailbreak attacks to below 1.70% on MiniGPT4 using the MM-SafetyBench benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods under the same conditions.