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.
arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
arXiv:2606. 06890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently rely on language priors, producing confident answers that are weakly grounded in visual evidence.
Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment.
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.
arXiv:2603. 06828v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We uncover a behavioral law of long-horizon vision-language models: models that maintain temporally grounded beliefs generalize better.
arXiv:2608.21928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In embodied AI, safety risk can be latent: a benign instruction and a safe scene become hazardous only when composed. Prior work has advanced embodied...
arXiv:2608. 10513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit visual inputs to bypass safety alignment inherited from their language backbones.
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.
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.
The paper introduces CAIT, a benchmark of 400 synthetic scenes featuring counter‑intuitive actions that challenge multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Human participants and proprietary models like Claude and Gemini perform well, but standard open‑source instruction‑tuned MLLMs fail, largely due to a strong language prior that overrides contradictory visual evidence. The study shows that Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning can help but introduces new issues, while targeted fine‑tuning and structured prompting can reduce reliance on language priors and improve visual grounding.
arXiv:2503. 11832v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent vision language models (VLMs) have made remarkable strides in generative modeling with multimodal inputs, particularly text and images.
arXiv:2608.30750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can comply with harmful requests delivered through images, even when their LLM backbones would refuse the same content in...