arXiv AI

Safety for Whom? Benchmarking Understanding Beyond Refusal in Egocentric Multimodal Assistants

arXiv AI
Sep 1

SafeAtlas-VL: Beyond Binary Multimodal Safety with Large-Scale Data and Guard Models

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
arXiv AI
Oct 27

Beyond Behaviour: A Stimulus-Response Safety Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper titled "Beyond Behaviour: A Stimulus-Response Safety Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models" examines how vision-language-action models respond to safety-critical stimuli. By testing three models on two video benchmarks, the authors analyze internal representations and action tendencies when faced with visible hazards and harmful outcomes. The results indicate that these models tend to continue task execution even after internally registering danger.

By Vy Vo, Dinh Phung
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 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 AI
Oct 16

Counterfactual Neighborhood Risk Fields: Evidence-Grounded Selective Safety for Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Counterfactual Neighborhood Risk Fields (CNRF), an evidence‑grounded framework that improves safety for vision‑language models (VLMs). CNRF builds context‑matched benign‑harmful counterfactual pairs, uses their representation differences to define risk directions, and separates neighborhood support from risk estimation. This approach allows selective intervention rather than blanket rejection, achieving high macro defense success rates across multiple VLMs while preserving benign‑task utility.

By Tianshi Wang, Jingsong Wang, Fengling Li, Jingjing Li, Xin Li, Lei Zhu
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Learning to Reason About Implicit Multimodal Harm: From Diagnosis to Generalization

The paper introduces MuPHI, a diagnostic benchmark that isolates multimodal harm arising solely from image‑text composition, providing benign counterfactuals and annotated harm rationales. Evaluation with MuPHI shows that vision‑language models can ground individual modalities but struggle to bind evidence into a coherent harm mechanism, and that existing harm detection methods transfer poorly to new harm distributions. To address this, the authors propose Compositional Harm Interpretation Learning (CHIL), which rewards evidence identification, cross‑modal binding, and verdict consistency, leading to significant improvements in out‑of‑distribution transfer and counterfactual robustness.

By Anisha Saha, Varsha Suresh, Teodora Kamova, Sophia Wiedmann, Timothy Hospedales, Vera Demberg