@inproceedings{ma-etal-2025-jailbreaking,
    title = "Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models",
    author = "Ma, Jiachen  and
      Li, Yijiang  and
      Xiao, Zhiqing  and
      Cao, Anda  and
      Zhang, Jie  and
      Ye, Chao  and
      Zhao, Junbo",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.172/",
    pages = "3141--3157",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7",
    abstract = "Text-to-image (T2I) models can be maliciously used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. Previous attacks largely depend on the availability of the diffusion model or involve a lengthy optimization process. In this work, we investigate a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model and demonstrate that the high-dimensional text embedding space inherently contains NSFW concepts that can be exploited to generate harmful images. We present the Jailbreaking Prompt Attack (JPA). JPA first searches for the target malicious concepts in the text embedding space using a group of antonyms generated by ChatGPT. Subsequently, a prefix prompt is optimized in the discrete vocabulary space to align malicious concepts semantically in the text embedding space.We further introduce a soft assignment with gradient masking technique that allows us to perform gradient ascent in the discrete vocabulary space.We perform extensive experiments with open-sourced T2I models, e.g. stable-diffusion-v1-4 and closed-sourced online services, e.g. DALL{\textperiodcentered}E 2 and Midjourney with black-box safety checkers. Results show that (1) JPA bypasses both text and image safety checkers, (2) while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. (3) JPA demonstrates a much faster speed than previous methods and can be executed in a fully automated manner. These merits render it a valuable tool for robustness evaluation in future text-to-image generation research."
}