arXiv Computer Vision

Decoupled Safety Control: A Safety-Control Algorithm for Training-Free Safety Guidance

Decoupled Safety Control (DSC) is a plug‑in algorithm that improves training‑free safety guidance for diffusion models by separating the unsafe condition from the intervention process. Unlike existing coupled safety‑control chains, DSC determines the intervention based on the current generation state, reducing residual unsafe content and preserving benign‑generation quality. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks demonstrate that DSC achieves stronger unsafe‑content suppression while maintaining efficient inference.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation

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 AI
Oct 5

Keep It CALM: Analyzing the Limits of Global Unsafety in Text-to-Image Generation

The paper examines the limitations of global unsafety signals used in training‑free safeguards for text‑to‑image generation, showing a trade‑off between coverage and selectivity. It introduces CALM, a counterfactual adaptive local modulation method that locally corrects unsafe token representations while preserving benign content. Experiments demonstrate that CALM outperforms global removal approaches in suppressing unsafe content without compromising utility.

By NaHyeon Park, Minhyun Lee, Hyunjung Shim
arXiv AI
Sep 24

InGuard: Towards Generalized Inner Guardrail for Safe Text-to-Image Generation

InGuard introduces an inner guardrail for text-to-image generation that operates within the model’s own representations, avoiding external classifiers. It grades prompts using the text encoder’s embeddings, modifies risky embeddings with SAGE to produce safe images, and employs a latent detector to halt generation early. Evaluated on the RevGen Safety Benchmark, InGuard achieves a 97.9–98.8% safety rate across five open-weight models while reducing benign disturbances, model parameters, and denoising steps.

By Zeyu Wang, Xiaodan Li, Zhiwen Li, Yuefeng Chen, Hui Xue
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

arXiv:2606. 17257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts.

By Rohit Kundu, Arindam Dutta, Sarosij Bose, Athula Balachandran, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
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 AI
Aug 19

DiSCO: Defending text-to-image generation through distribution-guided contrastive prompt optimization

DiSCO is a zero‑shot, black‑box defense for text‑to‑image models that operates solely at the prompt level. It expands prompts with a distribution‑guided suffix using beam search and contrastive scoring against safe and unsafe image pools generated by the target model, iteratively refining until safe content is produced. The method improves safety on the I2P benchmark under various red‑teaming attacks, reducing attack success rates by 37.7% and 25.13% while preserving semantic fidelity and image coherence.

By Tong Zhang, Motasem Alfarra, Carlos Hinojosa, Christos Louizos, Bernard Ghanem