arXiv Machine Learning

Seeing Through Conflicts: Improving Instruction Hierarchy Alignment in Vision-Language Models

arXiv AI
Sep 7

MM-IFEval-Pro: A Multilingual and Attack-Resistant Benchmark for Instruction-Following in Vision-Language Models

MM-IFEval-Pro is a new multilingual benchmark for evaluating instruction-following in vision-language models, covering both Chinese and English tasks. It includes 4 major task categories, 24 subcategories, and 8 instruction categories with 52 subcategories, each sample featuring an average of 3.0 constraints to mimic complex instruction scenarios. A reinforcement-learning training set with Chinese and adversarial instructions improves model performance on MM-IFEval-Pro and transfers well to other multimodal benchmarks, showing strong cross-task and cross-language generalization.

By Changming Xiao, Zhenliang Ni, Jinhui He, Han Shu, Jie Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 12

SafeCap: Improving LVLM Safety with Image Captioning Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 10513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit visual inputs to bypass safety alignment inherited from their language backbones.

By Caoyuan Ma, Wenpu Liu, Weichu Xie, Tian Gu, Shilei Zhao, Lingxi Min, Shuai Dong, Yuqi Xu, Ji Zhao, Ziyue Wang, Wenzheng Chang, Taiqiang Wu, Yongfu Zhu, Wenqi Shao, Yinqiang Zheng
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Breaking the weakest link to evade vision language models

The paper investigates how Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be fooled by tiny, human‑imperceptible changes to images. It introduces a gradient‑based attack that targets only the vision encoder, reducing computational cost while still effectively disrupting both untargeted and targeted multimodal interpretations. Experiments on open‑source VLMs such as Qwen2.5‑VL, Granite‑Vision, FastVLM, and Phi‑3.5‑Vision demonstrate that these small perturbations can dramatically alter the models’ textual outputs.

arXiv AI
Sep 30

Render Before Reading: Visual Rendering as a Prompt Injection Defense

The paper investigates how multimodal large language models are more susceptible to prompt injection when adversarial instructions are presented as text rather than as non-textual inputs like images. It proposes a training‑free defense that renders untrusted payloads into typographic images (or audio) before they reach the model, a method called Pictionary. Experiments on ten models and two benchmarks show that this approach significantly lowers attack success rates while maintaining normal functionality, and that fine‑tuning on image‑rendered instructions can further reduce the modality gap.

By Jie Zhang, Andrei Baroian, Jan N. van Rijn, Avital Shafran, Florian Tram\`{e}r
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

When Safety Overrides Vision: Exploring Dynamics between Vision Influence and Safety Alignment in Vision-Language Models

Aligned vision‑language models (VLMs) are designed to combine grounded visual reasoning with safe generation. The study finds that when safety constraints are applied, these models often abstain from answering questions that they could answer under default instruction, yet visual evidence continues to influence the decoding process. The authors show that safety‑induced abstention alters late‑stage hidden‑state dynamics, and that targeted interventions can restore grounded answering without retraining or changing visual inputs.