📄
Abstract - AEGIS: A Mechanism-Guided Defense against Visual Synonym Jailbreaks in Text-to-Image Models
Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved high visual fidelity and broad adoption, but remain vulnerable to safety violations when adversaries exploit them to synthesize illicit content. Existing alignment paradigms, from input sanitization to structural feature pruning, are largely organized around unsafe concepts explicitly exposed during filtering, editing, or localization. This leaves a blind spot for visual synonym attacks (VSA), a jailbreak where benign-looking prompts elicit prohibited imagery through implicit visual associations. As a result, current defenses face a safety-utility dilemma: they may either under-mitigate VSA threats or over-suppress visually similar benign concepts. The core challenge is that VSA hides the unsafe target at the textual surface while revealing it through generation-time visual-semantic convergence. In this work, we therefore shift from static suppression of pre-specified unsafe concepts to dynamic tracing of how unsafe semantics emerge during generation. Our mechanistic analysis shows that VSA and explicit unsafe prompts converge through sparse semantic-injecting attention heads, which serve as inference-time bottlenecks for prohibited visual semantics. Based on this insight, we propose AEGIS (Adaptive Evasion Guard via Identification and Steering), an inference-time defense that applies similarity-aware repulsion only at the identified vulnerable heads. Evaluated against 16 baselines, AEGIS improves both safety and utility. On SD 1.4, it reduces ASR to $\mathbf{0.00}/\mathbf{0.03}$ for in-domain violence/nudity VSA and achieves ASRs $\le \mathbf{0.09}$ on out-of-domain explicit and adversarial attacks. It preserves benign fidelity, avoids suppressing hard-negative concepts, and transfers to SD 2.1 and FLUX.1 after re-identifying the critical heads for each backbone.
AEGIS:一种机制引导的防御方法,用于对抗文本到图像模型中的视觉同义词越狱攻击 /
AEGIS: A Mechanism-Guided Defense against Visual Synonym Jailbreaks in Text-to-Image Models
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文揭示了文本到图像模型中的视觉同义词攻击,即通过看似无害的提示词隐晦地生成违规图像,并提出了一种名为AEGIS的防御方法,该方法在模型生成图像时动态追踪有害语义的涌现路径,并仅针对关键的注意力头进行精准抑制,从而在不影响正常图像生成质量的前提下有效防御此类攻击。