Yinzhi Cao
2026
Jailbreaking Safeguarded Text-to-Image Models via Large Language Models
Zhengyuan Jiang | Yuepeng Hu | Yuchen Yang | Yinzhi Cao | Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Zhengyuan Jiang | Yuepeng Hu | Yuchen Yang | Yinzhi Cao | Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Text-to-Image models may generate harmful content, such as pornographic images, particularly when unsafe prompts are submitted. To address this issue, safety filters are often added on top of text-to-image models, or the models themselves are aligned to reduce harmful outputs. However, these defenses remain vulnerable when an attacker strategically designs adversarial prompts to bypass these safety guardrails. In this work, we propose PromptTune, a method to jailbreak text-to-image models with safety guardrails using a fine-tuned large language model. Unlike other query-based jailbreak attacks that require repeated queries to the target model, our attack generates adversarial prompts efficiently after fine-tuning our AttackLLM. We evaluate our method on three datasets of unsafe prompts and against five safety guardrails. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively bypasses safety guardrails, outperforms existing no-box attacks, and also facilitates other query-based attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhengyuan-jiang/PromptTune.
CoLA: A Choice Leakage Attack Framework to Expose Privacy Risks in Subset Training
Qi Li | Cheng-Long Wang | Yinzhi Cao | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qi Li | Cheng-Long Wang | Yinzhi Cao | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Training models on a carefully chosen portion of data rather than the full dataset is now a standard preprocess for modern ML. From vision coreset selection to large-scale filtering in language models, it enables scalability with minimal utility loss. A common intuition is that training on fewer samples should also reduce privacy risks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption. We show that subset training is not privacy free: the very choices of which data are included or excluded can introduce new privacy surface and leak more sensitive information. Such information can be captured by adversaries either through side-channel metadata from the subset selection process or via the outputs of the target model. To systematically study this phenomenon, we propose CoLA (Choice Leakage Attack), a unified framework for analyzing privacy leakage in subset selection. In CoLA, depending on the adversary’s knowledge of the side-channel information, we define two practical attack scenarios: Subset-aware Side-channel Attacks and Black-box Attacks. Under both scenarios, we investigate two privacy surfaces unique to subset training: (1) Training-membership MIA (TM-MIA), which concerns only the privacy of training data membership, and (2) Selection-participation MIA (SP-MIA), which concerns the privacy of all samples that participated in the subset selection process. Notably, SP-MIA enlarges the notion of membership from model training to the entire data-model supply chain. Experiments on vision and language models show that existing threat models underestimate subset-training privacy risks: the expanded privacy surface leaks both training and selection membership, extending risks from individual models to the broader ML ecosystem.