Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in consumer, medical, financial, and enterprise applications. This broad deployment expands the safety surface: risks can arise from multimodal question answering, assistant responses, and cross-modal composition, while moderation policies may vary across products, regions, and deployment stages.
arXiv:2606. 25034v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose models often struggle to reliably identify and understand real-world multimodal risks, largely due to the inherent multimodal adversarial nature of content and AI safety.
By Shikai Qiu, Xiaowen Xu, Benlei Cui, Ting Ma, Xiufeng Huang, Wenjing Jiang, Shaoxuan He, Haolei Xu, Chunyang Chai, Yujian Li, Yiliang Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Ziheng Wang, Ziwen Xu, Zhaoyu Fan, Jinhao Chen, Ruijie Jian, Hongxing Li, Chuxi Xiao, Xinyue Chen, Wenxuan Liu, Libin Dong, Yupeng Cao, Xiaoqian Xia, Jing Wang, Zhe Jiang, Zhenan Ye, Guang Yang, Bin Liu, Wei Peng, Ziqiang Zhu, Meihui Lian, Kaiwen Lv Kacuila, Haidong Ding, Dongjie Zhang, Yangfan Zhou, Bingyu Zhu, Yan Wang, Hai Zhao, Xuan Jin, Wei Zhao, Pengfei Sun, Huiming Zhang, Wei Wang, Xipeng Cao, Jialun Chen, Xiao Chen, Shaola Ren, Yunqing Hu, Bin Li, Chengwen Yao, Meng Huang, Xianfeng Li, Bin Tang, Chao Liu, Hui Xue, Longtao Huang, Haiwen Hong
The paper introduces SAFE-PRO, a method for enhancing safety in multimodal large language models by proactively asking clarifying questions when cross‑modal ambiguity poses intent‑level risks. SAFE‑PRO employs a Risk‑Conditioned Uncertainty signal that blends predictive entropy with a learned cross‑modal risk score to guide both question‑asking and path optimization, prioritizing safety while reducing over‑refusal. The authors also present the SSUI‑Dialog dataset and demonstrate that SAFE‑PRO outperforms existing approaches, including GPT‑4o and Claude‑3.5‑Sonnet, across multiple benchmarks.
By Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Xuelong Li
arXiv:2604. 00310v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large-language models (MLLMs) often experience degraded safety alignment when harmful queries exploit cross-modal interactions.
By Anurag Kumar, Raghuveer Peri, Jon Burnsky, Alexandru Nelus, Rohit Paturi, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Yanjun Qi
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:2609.39688v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal encoders such as CLIP underlie many downstream systems, but their web-scale training data embed harmful associations that safety alignment...
By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Samuele Poppi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Diego Garcia-Olano, Rita Cucchiara