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arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
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.
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.
arXiv:2609.20850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show remarkable advancements, their cross-modal capabilities introduce complex vulnerabilities that easi...
The paper introduces RASET, a router‑agnostic safety‑critical expert tuning framework for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models. RASET identifies a small subset of experts that are responsible for safety enforcement and applies parameter‑efficient tuning only to those experts, preserving the model’s intrinsic routing behavior. Experiments on five open‑weight MoE backbones show that RASET achieves a high safety‑bypass yield, outperforming existing baselines by a significant margin.
arXiv:2606. 05177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multimodal safety benchmarks focus solely on visual inputs and cannot assess Omni Large Language Models (LLMs) that process vision, audio, and text.