Large vision-language models (LVLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit visual inputs to bypass safety alignment inherited from their language backbones. We propose SafeCap, a reinforcement-learning framework that aligns LVLMs through learned self-captioning.
arXiv:2609.22234v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Instruction hierarchy (IH) alignment teaches language models to prioritize higher-level instructions when inputs conflict. While studied primarily in...
By Nicholas Sansoterra, Zishuo Zheng, Sachin Kumar
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 MINT‑Safe, a new open‑source dataset of 11,270 multi‑image dialogues and 500 refusal VQA pairs designed to expose safety risks in multi‑modal large language models during open‑ended conversations. It also proposes TAD‑Align, a turn‑aware dual‑objective reward framework that dynamically up‑weights dialogue turns with inconsistent safety behavior, improving safety metrics on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and LLaVA‑Next‑7B. The results show over 10% reduction in attack success rate and notable gains in harmlessness and helpfulness while maintaining overall model performance.
By Han Zhu, Jiale Chen, Chengkun Cai, Shengjie Sun, Haoran Li, Yujin Zhou, Chi-Min Chan, Pengcheng Wen, Lei Li, Yike Guo, Sirui Han
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
arXiv:2606. 05748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Global-scale video moderation faces a dual challenge: the need for fine-grained multi-modal reasoning and the demand for interpretable outputs to support downstream enforcement.
By Kejuan Yang, Yizhuo Zhang, Mingyuan Du, Yue Zhang, Dixin Zheng, Kaili Zhao, Yang Xiao, Hanzhong Liang, Kenan Xiao
SafeRI proposes an on-demand safety alignment approach for large vision-language models, contrasting with existing always-on methods that globally modify model behavior. The framework uses a lightweight recognizer to evaluate token-level safety during autoregressive generation, gating a LoRA module that only activates when unsafe content is detected. By training the LoRA on unsafe prefixes and safe continuations, SafeRI redirects unsafe generations back to safe responses without perturbing the model’s original reasoning path.
By Caoyuan Ma, Tian Gu, Wenpu Liu, Weichu Xie, Shuai Dong, Yuqi Xu, Ji Zhao, Ziyue Wang, Wenzheng Chang, Taiqiang Wu, Yongfu Zhu, Wenqi Shao, Zheng Wang, Yinqiang Zheng
arXiv:2607. 18958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), represented by LLaVA and GPT-4V, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their visual inputs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant security risks.
By Sibo Wang, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen, Wen Gao
While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), represented by LLaVA and GPT-4V, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their visual inputs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant security risks. Existing defense methods predominantly target single-task scenarios (e.
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
SafeAtlas-VL introduces a large multimodal safety dataset with 1.5 million instances, rating image, request, and response risks on a five‑level ordinal scale across 15 harm categories and 55 subcategories. The accompanying SafeAtlas‑Bench provides 5,000 held‑out cases for evaluating ordinal predictions and continuous risk scores. Models trained on this data, including an 8B Guard model, achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior benchmarks by about 4% in F1 score.
By Zongrui Wang, Xiangyang Zhu, Sicheng Wang, Han Wang, Dingyi Rong, Zeyu Zhang, Chunyi Li, Yue Shi, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Yan Teng, Wei Sun, Ning Liu, Guangtao Zhai
Aligned vision‑language models (VLMs) are designed to combine grounded visual reasoning with safe generation. The study finds that when safety constraints are applied, these models often abstain from answering questions that they could answer under default instruction, yet visual evidence continues to influence the decoding process. The authors show that safety‑induced abstention alters late‑stage hidden‑state dynamics, and that targeted interventions can restore grounded answering without retraining or changing visual inputs.