JailDAM: Jailbreak Detection with Adaptive Memory for Vision-Language Model

Yi Nian*, Shenzhe Zhu*, Yuehan Qin, Shawn Li, Ziyi Wang, Chaowei Xiao, Yue Zhao†

(*Contribute equally, †Corresponding author)

📝 arxiv

❗️Content Warning: This repo contains examples of harmful language.

NEWS!!:

• 2025/09/03 We just released our code, thank you for your patient
• 2025/07/08 Our paper was accepted by COLM 2025!!!

TODO List:

• 2025/04/01 Create repo
• 2025/04/09 Release paper on Arxiv
• 2025/05/25 Release data
• 2025/09/03 Release Code

Quick Start

1. Download the dataset from Google Drive.
2. Place the data in the project root under a folder named ./data.
3. Set up the environment:

   conda env create -f environment.yml
   conda activate llava
   

4. Run the demo by opening demo.ipynb

💡 Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in vision-language tasks but also pose significant risks of generating harmful content, particularly through jailbreak attacks. Jailbreak attacks refer to intentional manipulations that bypass safety mechanisms in models, leading to the generation of inappropriate or unsafe content. Detecting such attacks is critical to ensuring the responsible deployment of MLLMs. Existing jailbreak detection methods face three primary challenges: (1) Many rely on model hidden states or gradients, limiting their applicability to white-box models, where the internal workings of the model are accessible; (2) They involve high computational overhead from uncertainty-based analysis, which limits real-time detection, and (3) They require fully labeled harmful datasets, which are often scarce in real-world settings. To address these issues, we introduce a test-time adaptive framework called JAILDAM . Our method leverages a memory-based approach guided by policy-driven unsafe knowledge representations, eliminating the need for explicit exposure to harmful data. By dynamically updating unsafe knowledge during test-time, our framework improves generalization to unseen jailbreak strategies while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on multiple VLM jailbreak benchmarks demonstrate that JAILDAM delivers state-of-the-art performance in harmful content detection, improving both accuracy and speed.

⚡ Detection Framework

JAILDAM overview. (A) Training: We encode safe text and images with CLIP, computing attention scores against a policy-driven unsafe memory bank. An autoencoder learns to reconstruct these features, linking benign inputs to unsafe concepts without explicit harmful data. (B) Inference: For each new input, we compute attention scores and measure the autoencoder’s reconstruction error; high error indicates potential harm. If similarity to the memory bank is low, JAILDAM updates the least-used concept with a residual representation, adapting to new attacks over time.

🚀 Defense Framework

Based on our attack detector, JAILDAM, we construct an end-to-end attack defense framework, denoted as JAILDAM-D (see Figure 3). This framework implements a two-stage defense approach:

1. Attack Detection: The incoming instruction ( S ) is first analyzed by JAILDAM, which evaluates whether the input contains potential attack patterns or harmful content.
2. Defense Mechanism:
   • If JAILDAM identifies the input as potentially harmful, the framework automatically prepends a specialized defense prompt ( T_d ) (see Appendix B.2) before the original query. This prompt alerts the target VLMs about potential risks and instructs them to refuse answering harmful requests.
   • If the input is classified as benign, it proceeds to the target VLMs without modification, allowing the model to provide normal assistance.

🏆 Main Results

Jailbreak Detection

Jailbreak Defense

👍 Acknowledgement

We use following amazing datasets/benchmarks as data source:

• MM-SafetyBench
• FigStep
• JailbreakV-28k
• MM-Vet

❌ Disclaimers

This dataset includes offensive content that some may find disturbing. It is intended solely for educational and research use.

Contact

• Yi Nian: yn2336@columbia.edu
• Shenzhe Zhu: cho.zhu@mail.utoronto.ca

📖 BibTeX:

@article{nian2025jaildam,
  title={JailDAM: Jailbreak Detection with Adaptive Memory for Vision-Language Model},
  author={Nian, Yi and Zhu, Shenzhe and Qin, Yuehan and Li, Li and Wang, Ziyi and Xiao, Chaowei and Zhao, Yue},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03770},
  year={2025}
}