# Visual Exclusivity Attacks: Automatic Multimodal Red Teaming via Agentic Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20198 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20198/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 38 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)
- 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 38)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (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)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01833/) (2024)
- [Visual Adversarial Examples Jailbreak Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13213/) (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)
- [JailBreakV: A Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of MultiModal Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03027/) (2024)
- [Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02207/) (2024)
- [Images are Achilles' Heel of Alignment: Exploiting Visual Vulnerabilities for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09792/) (2024)
- [Llama Guard 3 Vision: Safeguarding Human-AI Image Understanding Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10414/) (2024)
- [AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09513/) (2024)
- [X-Teaming: Multi-Turn Jailbreaks and Defenses with Adaptive Multi-Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13203/) (2025)
- [Weak-to-Strong Jailbreaking on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17256/) (2024)
- [Chain of Attack: a Semantic-Driven Contextual Multi-Turn attacker for LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05610/) (2024)
- [Best-of-N Jailbreaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03556/) (2024)
- [Jailbreaking GPT-4V via Self-Adversarial Attacks with System Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09127/) (2023)
- [Jailbreak Large Vision-Language Models Through Multi-Modal Linkage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00473/) (2024)
- [White-box Multimodal Jailbreaks Against Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17894/) (2024)
- [Foot-In-The-Door: A Multi-turn Jailbreak for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19820/) (2025)
- [Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Shuffle Inconsistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04931/) (2025)
- [IDEATOR: Jailbreaking and Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models Using Themselves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00827/) (2024)
- [Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses against Multimodal Generative Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09259/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ClawSafety: "Safe" LLMs, Unsafe Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01438/) (2026)
- [Automatic Hard Example Synthesis with Multi-Level Agentic Data Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14256/) (2026)
- [When Can Text Replace Vision? Structural Bottlenecks in Diagram Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39142/) (2026)
- [Deny Without Disabling: Authorization-Paired Evaluation and Control for Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00371/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current multimodal red teaming treats images as wrappers for malicious payloads via typography or adversarial noise. These attacks are structurally brittle, as standard defenses neutralize them once the payload is exposed. We introduce Visual Exclusivity (VE), a more resilient Image-as-Basis threat where harm emerges only through reasoning over visual content such as technical schematics. To systematically exploit VE, we propose Multimodal Multi-turn Agentic Planning (MM-Plan), a framework that reframes jailbreaking from turn-by-turn reaction to global plan synthesis. MM-Plan trains an attacker planner to synthesize comprehensive, multi-turn strategies, optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling self-discovery of effective strategies without human supervision. To rigorously benchmark this reasoning-dependent threat, we introduce VE-Safety, a human-curated dataset filling a critical gap in evaluating high-risk technical visual understanding. MM-Plan achieves 46.3% attack success rate against Claude 4.5 Sonnet and 13.8% against GPT-5, outperforming baselines by 2--5x where existing methods largely fail. These findings reveal that frontier models remain vulnerable to agentic multimodal attacks, exposing a critical gap in current safety alignment. Warning: This paper contains potentially harmful content.