arXiv Machine Learning

MUSE: A Run-Centric Platform for Multimodal Unified Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

Unsafe by Reciprocity: How Generation-Understanding Coupling Undermines Safety in Unified Multimodal Models

The paper examines how the tight integration of multimodal understanding and image generation in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) can create new safety vulnerabilities. It introduces RICE, an attack framework that exploits bidirectional interactions between generation and understanding to propagate unsafe signals across modalities. Experiments demonstrate high attack success rates in both Generation‑to‑Understanding and Understanding‑to‑Generation pathways, revealing previously overlooked safety weaknesses in UMMs.

By Kaishen Wang, Heng Huang
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 Computer Vision
Oct 12

A Systematic Study of Cross-Modal Typographic Attacks on Audio-Visual Reasoning

The paper introduces Multi-Modal Typography, a systematic investigation into how perturbations applied to speech and on-screen text can compromise audio‑visual reasoning in large language models. Experiments on the WorldSense benchmark show that such attacks can raise the attack success rate against Gemini 3.7 Flash from 9.53% to 43.41%, and fine‑tuning can reduce the success rate for Qwen2.5‑Omni‑7B from 60.6% to 52.0%. The study highlights that cross‑modal typography attacks are a significant, yet underexplored, vulnerability in multi‑modal reasoning systems.

By Tianle Chen, Deepti Ghadiyaram
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Multi2AV-Safety: Benchmarking Safety in Multimodal-to-Audio-Video Generation

Multi2AV‑Safety is a new benchmark for evaluating safety in multimodal-to-audio‑video generation. It covers all 11 non‑singleton conditioning configurations (text, image, audio, video) and contains 11,024 attack instances. The benchmark reveals that safety guards often fail when harmful semantics arise from combinations of benign inputs or when explicit harmful cues are masked by benign multimodal context, highlighting a gap in compositional risk perception.

By Kaichao Jiang, Changtao Miao, Baiqi Wu, Zhiyuan Lu, Kang Yang, Peiwei Zhao, Junchi Chen, Yunfeng Diao, He Liu, Qi Chu, Tao Gong, Nenghai Yu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Omni-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Audio-Visual Large Language Models

Omni‑SafetyBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of Omni‑Modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) that process visual, auditory, and textual data. It contains 23,328 test instances across 24 modality variations derived from 972 seed samples, and introduces metrics such as Safety‑score (based on Conditional Attack Success Rate and Conditional Refusal Rate) and Cross‑Modal Safety Consistency score. Evaluation of 11 state‑of‑the‑art OLLMs shows severe vulnerabilities, with only three models achieving a Safety‑score above 0.6 and safety degrading sharply for audio‑visual inputs, underscoring the need for improved safety alignment methods.

By Leyi Pan, Zheyu Fu, Yunpeng Zhai, Shuchang Tao, Sheng Guan, Shiyu Huang, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Felix Henry, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Does Unification Come at a Cost? Uni-SafeBench: A Safety Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Large Models

The paper introduces Uni-SafeBench, a safety benchmark designed to evaluate the holistic safety of Unified Multimodal Large Models (UMLMs) across six safety categories and seven task types. It also presents Uni-Judger, a framework that separates contextual safety from intrinsic safety to enable rigorous assessment. Evaluations reveal that current unified models do not consistently maintain the safety alignment of their underlying language models, and open‑source UMLMs perform significantly worse on safety than specialized multimodal models, especially in generation tasks.

By Zixiang Peng, Yongxiu Xu, Qin-Yi Zhang, Jiexun Shen, Yi-Fan Zhang, Hongbo Xu, Yubin Wang, Gaopeng Gou