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...
By Yueming Lyu, Yilian Shi, Haoxiang Tan, Linzhuang Zou, Qihao Wang, Guihua Yu, Jie Qin, Xin Gao, Chenyang Si, Jing Dong, Caifeng Shan
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:2604. 00310v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large-language models (MLLMs) often experience degraded safety alignment when harmful queries exploit cross-modal interactions.
By Anurag Kumar, Raghuveer Peri, Jon Burnsky, Alexandru Nelus, Rohit Paturi, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Yanjun Qi
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.
By Jiayi Li, Kun Zhan
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 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
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:2610.00341v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) transition toward natively unified architectures, evaluating their safety in synergistic harmful image-text generat...
By Bingjun Luo, Jialin Guo, Tony Wang, Siqi Li
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language interaction, yet their safety alignment remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. A key challenge is that s...
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:2608.21775v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet they remain vulnerable to generating harmful content. From adver...
By Afshin Orojlooyjadid, Hitesh Patel
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