TISR: Breaking Vision–Language Models via Text–Image Segmentation and Reassembly

Qi Lu, Simeng Qin, Xiaoshuang Jia, Jie Liao, Yihao Huang, Tianhang Zheng, Ke Ma, Xiaojun Jia


Abstract
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal understanding capabilities, yet their inherent security vulnerabilities remain a pressing concern. Prior studies have indicated that enhancing chain-of-thought reasoning can inadvertently facilitate jailbreaks; however, existing attempts often rely on image masking, which only modestly extends reasoning depth and performs poorly against advanced commercial closed-source models. To bridge this gap, we propose an effective jailbreak method, Text–Image Segmentation and Reassembly (TISR). TISR disperses harmful semantic fragments across the visual modality while employing text-based role-playing to guide their reassembly. This strategic organization conceals surface-level toxicity while preserving malicious intent, thereby extending LVLM reasoning chains and enabling successful jailbreaks. Our experiments show that LVLMs, leveraging their visual understanding and reasoning abilities, can reconstruct complete harmful semantics while failing to uphold safety constraints. Extensive evaluations across massive LVLMs demonstrate that the proposed TISR achieves state-of-the-art attack performance, surpassing prior multi-modal jailbreak methods. Specifically, it attains average Attack Success Rates (ASR) exceeding 90% across three benchmark datasets on four leading commercial LVLMs.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.186
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3954–3975
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.186/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Lu, Simeng Qin, Xiaoshuang Jia, Jie Liao, Yihao Huang, Tianhang Zheng, Ke Ma, and Xiaojun Jia. 2026. TISR: Breaking Vision–Language Models via Text–Image Segmentation and Reassembly. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 3954–3975, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TISR: Breaking Vision–Language Models via Text–Image Segmentation and Reassembly (Lu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.186.pdf