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
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
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can act unsafely when individually benign images and texts are interpreted jointly. Beyond implicit reasoning risk, where reasoning drifts toward harm, we iden...
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.
By Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Xuelong Li
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
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: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.
By Manh Luong, Tamas Abraham, Junae Kim, Amar Kaur, Rollin Omari, Gholamreza Haffari, Trang Vu, Lizhen Qu, Dinh Phung
arXiv:2606. 31876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To improve safety in Large Language Models (LLMs) we can either perform post-training alignment or exploit refusal directions in the activation space.
By Moreno D'Inc\`a, Massimiliano Mancini, Nicu Sebe
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: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.
By Xi Li, Shu Zhao, Xiaohan Zou, Fei Zhao, Fuxiao Liu, Yusen Zhang, Cheng Han, Yushun Dong, Jiaqi Wang
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: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