Low-Effort Jailbreak Attacks Against Text-to-Image Safety Filters
On the map: LLM safety and security → Vision-language and text-to-image safety
Abstract (arXiv)
Text-to-image generative models are widely deployed in creative tools and online platforms. To mitigate misuse, these systems rely on safety filters and moderation pipelines that aim to block harmful or policy violating content. In this work we show that modern text-to-image models remain vulnerable to low-effort jailbreak attacks that require only natural language prompts. We present a systematic study of prompt-based strategies that bypass safety filters without model access, optimization, or adversarial training. We introduce a taxonomy of visual jailbreak techniques including artistic reframing, material substitution, pseudo-educational framing, lifestyle aesthetic camouflage, and ambiguous action substitution. These strategies exploit weaknesses in prompt moderation and visual safety filtering by masking unsafe intent within benign semantic contexts. We evaluate these attacks across several state-of-the-art text-to-image systems and demonstrate that simple linguistic modifications can reliably evade existing safeguards and produce restricted imagery. Our findings highlight a critical gap between surface-level prompt filtering and the semantic understanding required to detect adversarial intent in generative media systems. Across all tested models and attack categories we observe an attack success rate (ASR) of up to 74.47%.
Key facts. Cited by 5 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 27 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.
Builds on
27 of 40 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2025PLA: Prompt Learning Attack against Text-to-Image Generative Models14 Jul
- 2024Perception-guided Jailbreak against Text-to-Image Models20 Aug
- 2024A Survey of Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models: Resources, Advances, and Future Trends10 Jul
- 2024Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models2 Apr
- 2023To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now18 Oct
- 2023Ring-A-Bell! How Reliable are Concept Removal Methods for Diffusion Models?16 Oct
- 2023SneakyPrompt: Jailbreaking Text-to-image Generative Models20 May
Other references · 20
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
- 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,585
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
- 2014Going Deeper with Convolutionscited by 4,241
- 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?cited by 1,651
- 2022Red Teaming Language Models with Language Modelscited by 1,026
- 2023A Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 725
- 2022Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Modelscited by 513
- 2024Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Modelscited by 477
- 2023MMA-Diffusion: MultiModal Attack on Diffusion Modelscited by 194
8 more
- 2023Unsafe Diffusion: On the Generation of Unsafe Images and Hateful Memes From Text-To-Image Modelscited by 175
- 2022Can Machines Help Us Answering Question 16 in Datasheets, and In Turn Reflecting on Inappropriate Content?cited by 155
- 2023A Pilot Study of Query-Free Adversarial Attack against Stable Diffusioncited by 76
- 2024AI auditing: The Broken Bus on the Road to AI Accountabilitycited by 43
- 2019ColorNet: Investigating the importance of color spaces for image classificationcited by 31
- 2025Anyone Can Jailbreak: Prompt-Based Attacks on LLMs and T2Iscited by 7
- 2020StegColNet: Steganalysis based on an ensemble colorspace approachcited by 3
- 2025Say It Differently: Linguistic Styles as Jailbreak Vectorscited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026An Empirical Study of Multi-Generation Sampling for Jailbreak Detection in Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Compression as an Adversarial Amplifier Through Decision Space Reductioncited by 0
- 2026Prompt Injection Detection is Regime-Dependent: A Deployment-Aware Evaluation with Interpretable Structural Signalscited by 0
- 2026PixJail: Self-Evolving Paper-to-Pipeline Reproduction for Text-to-Image Jailbreak Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Erasing Without Collateral Damage: Precise Concept Removal in Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026Erasing Without Collateral Damage: Precise Concept Removal in Diffusion Models6 Jul 2026
- 2026PixJail: Self-Evolving Paper-to-Pipeline Reproduction for Text-to-Image Jailbreak Evaluation23 Jun 2026
- 2026Prompt Injection Detection is Regime-Dependent: A Deployment-Aware Evaluation with Interpretable Structural Signals26 May 2026
- 2026An Empirical Study of Multi-Generation Sampling for Jailbreak Detection in Large Language Models20 Apr 2026
- 2026Compression as an Adversarial Amplifier Through Decision Space Reduction8 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Reading Between the Pixels: An Inscriptive Jailbreak Attack on Text-to-Image Models
- 2025Dynamic Optimization and Safety Indicator Injection for Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Models with Multimodal Safety Filters
- 2026Mind the Gap: Zero-Query Jailbreaks via Filter-Generator Discrepancy in Text-to-Image Systems
- 2025Jailbreaking Safeguarded Text-to-Image Models via Large Language Models
- 2026Open Models, Open Risks: Measuring Unsafe Generation in Text-to-Image Models In the Wild
- 2026TYPO: Instruction-Dense Visual Jailbreaks against Commercial Closed-Source Image-Generation Models
- 2024Multimodal Pragmatic Jailbreak on Text-to-image Models
- 2024Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses against Multimodal Generative Models: A Survey