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
The paper introduces Safety-aware Contrastive Decoding (SafeCoDe), a lightweight, model‑agnostic framework designed to improve context‑aware safety in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). SafeCoDe operates in two stages: a contrastive decoding step that highlights tokens sensitive to visual context by contrasting real and Gaussian‑noised images, and a global‑aware token modulation strategy that adjusts refusals based on scene‑level reasoning and predicted safety verdicts. Experiments across various MLLM architectures and safety benchmarks demonstrate that SafeCoDe consistently enhances context‑sensitive refusal behaviors while maintaining model helpfulness.
By Zheyuan Liu, Zhangchen Xu, Guangyao Dou, Xiangchi Yuan, Zhaoxuan Tan, Radha Poovendran, Meng Jiang
arXiv:2609.39688v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal encoders such as CLIP underlie many downstream systems, but their web-scale training data embed harmful associations that safety alignment...
By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Samuele Poppi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Diego Garcia-Olano, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv:2608.29589v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) safety guardrails fail to generalize equitably to non-standard dialects. Evaluating 23,080 paired prompts across five English diale...
By Minkyu Kim, Juhwan Choi, YoungBin Kim
InGuard introduces an inner guardrail for text-to-image generation that operates within the model’s own representations, avoiding external classifiers. It grades prompts using the text encoder’s embeddings, modifies risky embeddings with SAGE to produce safe images, and employs a latent detector to halt generation early. Evaluated on the RevGen Safety Benchmark, InGuard achieves a 97.9–98.8% safety rate across five open-weight models while reducing benign disturbances, model parameters, and denoising steps.
By Zeyu Wang, Xiaodan Li, Zhiwen Li, Yuefeng Chen, Hui Xue
DiSCO is a zero‑shot, black‑box defense for text‑to‑image models that operates solely at the prompt level. It expands prompts with a distribution‑guided suffix using beam search and contrastive scoring against safe and unsafe image pools generated by the target model, iteratively refining until safe content is produced. The method improves safety on the I2P benchmark under various red‑teaming attacks, reducing attack success rates by 37.7% and 25.13% while preserving semantic fidelity and image coherence.
By Tong Zhang, Motasem Alfarra, Carlos Hinojosa, Christos Louizos, Bernard Ghanem
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:2608. 03284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring safety and policy compliance in text-to-image diffusion models remains a critical challenge, as benign or adversarial prompts can often elicit prohibited content, e.
By Jinya Sakurai, Shueicheng Yan, Xun Xu
arXiv:2608.21869v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models offer powerful visual generation, but their controllability creates a critical safety challenge: adversarial pro...
By Shreyash Dhoot, Paras Dhiman, Arsh Abbas Naqvi, Aranbi Dutta, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain, Amitava Das
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.
The paper introduces COMIC, a reference‑aware safety gate designed for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). COMIC detects the operation requested by a user, identifies visual targets through OCR and open‑vocabulary proposals, and evaluates safety on explicit operation‑target pairs, using max‑risk aggregation and quality‑aware routing to decide whether to allow or block a request. Experiments on several open‑source MLLMs and jailbreak benchmarks show that COMIC improves robustness while maintaining benign utility and efficiency.
By Md Abdullahil Oaphy, Anhao Xiang, Zongxing Xie, Huayue Gu, Chenyu Wang, Honghui Xu
arXiv:2607. 22745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid advances in image generation are eroding the evidentiary value of visual content in settings where authenticity can affect public safety and personal reputation.
By Yi-Zhi Wang, Yichen Xiao, Linan Yue, Weibo Gao, Yichao Du, Pengfei Fang, Shimin Di, Min-Ling Zhang