arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 29

When the Prompt Becomes Visual: Vision-Centric Jailbreak Attacks for Large Image Editing Models

arXiv:2602. 10179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large image editing models have shifted the paradigm from text-driven instructions to vision-prompt editing, where user intent is inferred directly from visual inputs such as marks, arrows, and visual-text prompts.

By Jiacheng Hou, Yining Sun, Ruochong Jin, Haochen Han, Fangming Liu, Wai Kin Victor Chan, Alex Jinpeng 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 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

AEGIS: A Mechanism-Guided Defense against Visual Synonym Jailbreaks in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved high visual fidelity and broad adoption, but remain vulnerable to safety violations when adversaries exploit them to synthesize illicit content. Existing alignment paradigms, from input sanitization to structural feature pruning, are largely organized around unsafe concepts explicitly exposed during filtering, editing, or localization.

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
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
6d ago

The Plot Twist: Jailbreaking Unified Multimodal Models with a Three-Act NarrativeAttack

The paper introduces NarrativeAttack, a jailbreak framework that exploits unified multimodal models (UMMs) by embedding a malicious query within a self‑contained three‑act visual narrative. The attack uses the model’s own image generator to create setup and resolution images, hiding the malicious event as a hidden climax, and concludes with an image‑based guessing game that forces the model to select the relevant answer. Experiments demonstrate that NarrativeAttack outperforms previous methods, achieving up to 88.25% attack success rate on Gemini‑2.5‑Flash, revealing a significant safety vulnerability in UMMs.

By Shaoxiong Guo, Tianyi Du, Lijun Li, Yuyao Wu, Jie Li, Jing Shao