Overloading Large Vision-Language Models for Jailbreaking

Haoyu Zhang, Yangyang Guo, Mohan Kankanhalli

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit remarkable vision-language capabilities and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications such as personal assistants, document analysis systems, and embodied agents. However, their dual-modal attack surfaces make them vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing LVLM jailbreaks rely on simple designs, e.g., short text and out-of-distribution images. Nevertheless, recent advancements in both large language model backbones and multimodal mechanisms undermine these attacks, particularly their transferability among model architectures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel information overloading method that is equipped with both extensive text and multi-dimensional image attacks. These components are arranged in recursion-based image-typography layouts to exponentially increase multimodal information complexity. This overloading approach amplifies the cross-modal processing required, which undermines the safety alignment in LVLMs. Extensive experiments on both open-sourced and commercial LVLMs establish our method as a new state-of-the-art LVLM jailbreak attack. On open-source models, our method achieves an average ASR of 88.6%; on commercial LVLMs, it reaches an average ASR of 84.0%, exceeding the best baseline by 48.7%. Moreover, our prompts optimized on open-source surrogate models transfer effectively across model families. Beyond empirical results, we probe the safety-critical information flows within victim LVLMs. Our observations reveal that complex image-typography compositions induce intensified cross-modal processing and reduce the model's certainty in generating refusal responses. Together, these findings highlight information overloading as a practical and emerging safety risk for real-world LVLM deployments, underscoring the need for stronger defenses against complex multimodal jailbreak inputs.