[2603.20198] Visual Exclusivity Attacks: Automatic Multimodal Red Teaming via Agentic Planning

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2603.20198 (cs) [Submitted on 5 Feb 2026] Title:Visual Exclusivity Attacks: Automatic Multimodal Red Teaming via Agentic Planning Authors:Yunbei Zhang, Yingqiang Ge, Weijie Xu, Yuhui Xu, Jihun Hamm, Chandan K. Reddy View a PDF of the paper titled Visual Exclusivity Attacks: Automatic Multimodal Red Teaming via Agentic Planning, by Yunbei Zhang and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Current multimodal red teaming treats images as wrappers for malicious payloads via typography or adversarial noise. These attacks are structurally brittle, as standard defenses neutralize them once the payload is exposed. We introduce Visual Exclusivity (VE), a more resilient Image-as-Basis threat where harm emerges only through reasoning over visual content such as technical schematics. To systematically exploit VE, we propose Multimodal Multi-turn Agentic Planning (MM-Plan), a framework that reframes jailbreaking from turn-by-turn reaction to global plan synthesis. MM-Plan trains an attacker planner to synthesize comprehensive, multi-turn strategies, optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling self-discovery of effective strategies without human supervision. To rigorously benchmark this reasoning-dependent threat, we introduce VE-Safety, a human-curated dataset filling a critical gap in evaluating high-risk technical visual understanding. MM-Plan achieves 46.3% attack success rate against Claude 4.5 So...