Hard to Read, Easy to Jailbreak: How Visual Degradation Bypasses MLLM Safety Alignment
Recent advancements in visual context compression enable MLLMs to process ultra-long contexts efficiently by rendering text into images. However, we identify a critical vulnerability inherent to this paradigm: lowering image resolution inadvertently catalyzes jailbreaking. Our experiments reveal that the safety defenses of SOTA models deteriorate sharply as resolution degrades, surprisingly persisting even when text remains legible. We attribute this to ``Cognitive Overload'', hypothesizing that the effort required to decipher degraded inputs diverts attentional resources from safety auditing. This phenomenon is consistent across various visual perturbations, including noise and geometric...
| Authors | Zhixue Song, Boyan Han, Yiwei Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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