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The paper introduces COMIC, a reference‑aware safety gate designed for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). COMIC detects the operation requested by a user, identifies visual targets through OCR and open‑vocabulary proposals, and evaluates safety on explicit operation‑target pairs, using max‑risk aggregation and quality‑aware routing to decide whether to allow or block a request. Experiments on several open‑source MLLMs and jailbreak benchmarks show that COMIC improves robustness while maintaining benign utility and efficiency.
ReFrame is a training‑free framework that enhances safety alignment for multimodal large language models at test time. It uses two lightweight agents: one generates risk and utility evidence, and the other rewrites prompts and routes images to create a safe proxy before invoking the deployed MLLM. Experiments show that ReFrame improves jailbreak defense, safety awareness, and reduces over‑sensitivity while maintaining multimodal utility.
The paper introduces Uni-SafeBench, a safety benchmark designed to evaluate the holistic safety of Unified Multimodal Large Models (UMLMs) across six safety categories and seven task types. It also presents Uni-Judger, a framework that separates contextual safety from intrinsic safety to enable rigorous assessment. Evaluations reveal that current unified models do not consistently maintain the safety alignment of their underlying language models, and open‑source UMLMs perform significantly worse on safety than specialized multimodal models, especially in generation tasks.
The paper examines how the tight integration of multimodal understanding and image generation in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) can create new safety vulnerabilities. It introduces RICE, an attack framework that exploits bidirectional interactions between generation and understanding to propagate unsafe signals across modalities. Experiments demonstrate high attack success rates in both Generation‑to‑Understanding and Understanding‑to‑Generation pathways, revealing previously overlooked safety weaknesses in UMMs.
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.
arXiv:2608. 07535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) integrate heterogeneous modalities through modality alignment and fusion, enabling stronger understanding and reasoning.