arXiv Machine Learning

Safe responses matter: Output-aware safety guardrail mitigate over-refusal in MLLMs

arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

SingGuard: A Policy-Adaptive Multimodal LLM Guardrail with Dynamic Reasoning

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in consumer, medical, financial, and enterprise applications. This broad deployment expands the safety surface: risks can arise from multimodal question answering, assistant responses, and cross-modal composition, while moderation policies may vary across products, regions, and deployment stages.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

Safety Beyond the Interface: Detecting Harm via Latent States in Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can internally detect harmful content, bypassing external guardrails that add latency and computational cost. By extracting activations from LLaMA‑3.1‑8B and training lightweight MLP probes, the authors achieve high F1 scores (99%, 83%, and 84%) on WildJailbreak, Beavertails, and AEGIS 2.0 benchmarks, rivaling much larger guard models while reducing overhead. This suggests that internal state monitoring can provide efficient safety checks for resource‑constrained, time‑critical deployments.

By Alizishaan Khatri, Chiquita Prabhu, Omkar Neogi
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Transfer Safety Awareness for Cross-Modal Safety Drift in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates cross‑modal safety drift in multimodal large language models, where a harmless text query paired with a visual image can trigger harmful responses. Empirical analysis identifies unsafe response patterns and shows that visual cues receive limited attention, weakening refusal mechanisms. The authors introduce Safety‑Awareness Representation Transfer (SRT), a lightweight method that transfers safety signals from text processing to mitigate cross‑modal drift while maintaining model utility.

By Tianqi Xiao, Shiyao Cui, Minghao Zhang, Junxiao Yang, Renmiao Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation

arXiv:2606. 05290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture.

By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Sara Sarto, Florian Schiffers, Garin Kessler, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Safety-Aligned Weights Are Not Enough: Refusal-Teacher-Guided Finetuning Enhances Safety and Downstream Performance under Harmful Finetuning Attacks

arXiv:2506.07356v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Finetuning-as-a-Service (FaaS) enables customization of Large Language Models (LLMs) using user data, this service is vulnerable to safety de...

By Seokil Ham, Yubin Choi, Yujin Yang, Seungju Cho, Younghun Kim, Changick Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 6

From Risk Classification to Action Plan Remediation: A Guardrail Feedback Driven Framework for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 05805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based guardrails typically safeguard agents by evaluating proposed actions or inputs before execution, producing safety signals such as binary allow/deny decisions, risk categories, and/or explanatory rationales about potential policy violations.

By Yuhao Sun, Jiacheng Zhang, Shaanan Cohney, Zhexin Zhang, Feng Liu, Xingliang Yuan