[2605.07250] Hard to Read, Easy to Jailbreak: How Visual Degradation Bypasses MLLM Safety Alignment

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition arXiv:2605.07250 (cs) [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Title:Hard to Read, Easy to Jailbreak: How Visual Degradation Bypasses MLLM Safety Alignment Authors:Zhixue Song, Boyan Han, Yiwei Wang, Chi Zhang View a PDF of the paper titled Hard to Read, Easy to Jailbreak: How Visual Degradation Bypasses MLLM Safety Alignment, by Zhixue Song and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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 distortion. To address this, we propose a simple ``Structured Cognitive Offloading'' strategy that mitigates these risks by enforcing a serialized pipeline to decouple visual transcription from safety assessment. Our work exposes a significant risk in vision-based compression and provides critical insights for the secure design of future MLLMs. Commen...