arXiv AI

Evolving Safety Landscape of Multi-modal Large Language Models: A Survey of Emerging Threats and Safeguards

arXiv:2608. 07535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) integrate heterogeneous modalities through modality alignment and fusion, enabling stronger understanding and reasoning.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

ReFrame: Evidence-Guided Test-Time Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models

ReFrame is a training‑free framework that enhances safety alignment for multimodal large language models at test time. It uses two lightweight agents: one generates risk and utility evidence, and the other rewrites prompts and routes images to create a safe proxy before invoking the deployed MLLM. Experiments show that ReFrame improves jailbreak defense, safety awareness, and reduces over‑sensitivity while maintaining multimodal utility.

By Wenzheng Jiang, Xuankun Rong, Yuanzhao Zhai, Dawei Feng, Huaimin Wang
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 Machine Learning
Sep 11

Understanding In-Context Multimodal Jailbreaks via Posterior Reweighting

The paper introduces a posterior reweighting framework to explain and counter in-context learning jailbreaks in multimodal large language models. It models the model as switching between safe and harmful behavioral modes, interpreting prompt demonstrations as evidence that shifts the posterior. Using this view, the authors derive scaling laws for jailbreak effectiveness and propose a defense that injects benign counter‑evidence to suppress harmful drift while maintaining utility.

By Xu Zhang, Dev Mistry, Xiang Xu, Ren Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Text-Anchored Semantic Perturbations for Transferable Jailbreak Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces TA-SPA, a black‑box jailbreak method for multimodal large language models that generates transferable perturbations in a text‑anchored semantic space. It combines Text‑Anchored Semantic Factorization (TASF) to separate cross‑modal semantic factors from modality‑specific residuals with Semantic‑Preserving Augmentation (SPA) to diversify harmful target anchors while maintaining semantic consistency. Experiments demonstrate strong attack effectiveness and transferability to commercial MLLMs, with competitive performance against representative defenses.

By Wenyun Li, Guiping Cao, Xiangyuan Lan, Zheng Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

COMIC: Reference-Aware Safety Gating for Multimodal Large Language Models

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 AI
Sep 7

When Seeing Overrides Knowing: Visual Dominance and Deferral-Based Method for Personalized Safety in VLMs

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.

By Edward Sun, Yuchen Wu, Zixian Ma, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Yijia Xiao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ranjay Krishna, Wei Wang, Jindong Wang, Aylin Caliskan