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.
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:2611.07216v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to compositional harm: an image and a prompt that are benign in isolation become harmful through...
By Hong kyu Lee, Kai Shu, Li Xiong
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...
By Jiaxuan Li, Jiahao Zhang, Duc Minh Vo, Huy H. Nguyen, Pride Kavumba, Koki Wataoka
arXiv:2509. 25533v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Vision Language Models (VLMs) are deployed across safety-critical applications, understanding and controlling their behavioral patterns has become increasingly important.
By Ravikumar Balakrishnan, Mansi Phute
arXiv:2610.07774v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) face compositional safety risks where harmful intent emerges from the interaction between visual and textual inputs. As m...
By Ziyuan Yang, Wenxuan Ding, Shangbin Feng, Yulia Tsvetkov