Conceal, Reconstruct, Jailbreak: Exploiting the Reconstruction-Concealment Tradeoff in MLLMs

Intent-obfuscation-based jailbreak attacks on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) transform a harmful query into a concealed multimodal input to bypass safety mechanisms. We show that such attacks are governed by a reconstruction--concealment tradeoff: the transformed input must hide harmful intent from safety filters while remaining recoverable enough for the victim model to reconstruct the original request. Through a reconstruction analysis of three representative black-box methods, we find that existing transformations struggle to balance this tradeoff, limiting their effectiveness. In contrast, we show that character-removed variants achieve a better balance. Building on this, we propose concealment-aware variant construction, which greedily selects character-removed variants that are low in harmful-keyword alignment and mutually diverse, and instantiates them through five modality-aware prompting strategies. We further introduce keyword-related distractor images that depict the harmful keyword in diverse contexts, providing more effective auxiliary visual context than generic distractor images. Experiments across closed-source and open-source MLLMs show the proposed strategies outperform strong baselines, revealing an underexplored vulnerability: a model's own reconstruction ability can be exploited to recover hidden harmful intent and produce unsafe responses.