SafeAtlas-VL introduces a large multimodal safety dataset with 1.5 million instances, rating image, request, and response risks on a five‑level ordinal scale across 15 harm categories and 55 subcategories. The accompanying SafeAtlas‑Bench provides 5,000 held‑out cases for evaluating ordinal predictions and continuous risk scores. Models trained on this data, including an 8B Guard model, achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior benchmarks by about 4% in F1 score.
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:2606. 25034v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose models often struggle to reliably identify and understand real-world multimodal risks, largely due to the inherent multimodal adversarial nature of content and AI safety.
The paper introduces SAFE-PRO, a method for enhancing safety in multimodal large language models by proactively asking clarifying questions when cross‑modal ambiguity poses intent‑level risks. SAFE‑PRO employs a Risk‑Conditioned Uncertainty signal that blends predictive entropy with a learned cross‑modal risk score to guide both question‑asking and path optimization, prioritizing safety while reducing over‑refusal. The authors also present the SSUI‑Dialog dataset and demonstrate that SAFE‑PRO outperforms existing approaches, including GPT‑4o and Claude‑3.5‑Sonnet, across multiple benchmarks.
arXiv:2604. 00310v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large-language models (MLLMs) often experience degraded safety alignment when harmful queries exploit cross-modal interactions.
The paper introduces MPS-Bench, a benchmark of 5,181 scenarios from 584 real-world images across 12 high-risk domains, each paired with a hidden user profile, to evaluate personalized safety in vision‑language models (VLMs). Eight leading VLMs were tested and found to almost always respond directly (86‑99%) without seeking missing context, scoring no higher than 2.6/5 on personalized safety. The authors identify a phenomenon called visual dominance, where visual information enters text representations early and suppresses textual risk signals, and propose PRISM, a lightweight input monitor that predicts when a query should be deferred, achieving 0.978 AUC and outperforming all tested models on the safety‑utility Pareto frontier.
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...
arXiv:2608. 16622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal harmful meme detection is typically formulated as image--text harmfulness classification.
arXiv:2609.20850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show remarkable advancements, their cross-modal capabilities introduce complex vulnerabilities that easi...
arXiv:2609.36562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains, their reliability is threatened by multimodal im...
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.
arXiv:2606. 05177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multimodal safety benchmarks focus solely on visual inputs and cannot assess Omni Large Language Models (LLMs) that process vision, audio, and text.
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.