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Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models

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arxiv 2402.02207 v2 pith:MBD6DYFK submitted 2024-02-03 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords fine-tuningvllmsdatasetmodelssafetyharmfulvision-languagealignment
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence of harmful data during vision-language instruction fine-tuning, and that VLLM fine-tuning can cause forgetting of safety alignment previously learned by the underpinning LLM. To address this issue, we first curate a vision-language safe instruction-following dataset VLGuard covering various harmful categories. Our experiments demonstrate that integrating this dataset into standard vision-language fine-tuning or utilizing it for post-hoc fine-tuning effectively safety aligns VLLMs. This alignment is achieved with minimal impact on, or even enhancement of, the models' helpfulness. The versatility of our safety fine-tuning dataset makes it a valuable resource for safety-testing existing VLLMs, training new models or safeguarding pre-trained VLLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuned VLLMs effectively reject unsafe instructions and substantially reduce the success rates of several black-box adversarial attacks, which approach zero in many cases. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ys-zong/VLGuard.

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Cited by 14 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Gradient Immunity: Null-Space Resistance to Malicious Fine-Tuning

    cs.CR 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Calibrating a null-space gate to fully cover the defender's harmful data keeps post-fine-tuning attack success at pre-release levels, but this is a coverage and calibration consequence rather than a tested defense on ...

  2. One Anchor for All: Unified Multilingual and Multimodal Safety Alignment for LVLMs

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A small set of model neurons shared across languages and modalities can transfer English-only safety training to multilingual and multimodal refusal behavior.

  3. V-DEAL: Diagnosing Video Safety De-Calibration as an Understanding-Refusal Coupling Failure

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Video LLMs understand harmful content but activate weaker refusal signals when the query is benign; prompt realignment reduces attack success from ~48% to ~1%.

  4. Safe responses matter: Output-aware safety guardrail mitigate over-refusal in MLLMs

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A lightweight multi-instance contrastive classifier on MLLM hidden states predicts output harmfulness, matching input-side safety while sharply lowering over-refusal.

  5. Secure Tug-of-War (SecTOW): Iterative Defense-Attack Training with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Model Security

    cs.CR 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An iterative attacker-defender reinforcement learning method that makes a multimodal LLM refuse more jailbreak prompts without over-refusing ordinary queries.

  6. LoX: Low-Rank Extrapolation Robustifies LLM Safety Against Fine-tuning

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Low-rank extrapolation of an aligned model's weight update (LoX) reduces how much later fine-tuning erodes safety refusal behavior.

  7. Bootstrapping LLM Robustness for VLM Safety via Reducing the Pretraining Modality Gap

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Reducing the modality gap between image and text embeddings during LVLM pretraining reduces unsafe response rates by up to 16.3% across models and benchmarks.

  8. MM-RLHF: The Next Step Forward in Multimodal LLM Alignment

    cs.CL 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A human-annotated multimodal preference dataset plus critique-based reward modeling and reward-margin-weighted DPO improves MLLM performance across many benchmarks.

  9. Attention Misses Visual Risk: Risk-Adaptive Steering for Multimodal Safety Alignment

    cs.CV 2025-10 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Risk-adaptive activation steering, guided by a prototype-similarity risk score computed on the first three response tokens, substantially reduces multimodal jailbreak success rates across four MLLMs while preserving utility.

  10. Seeing the Threat: Vulnerabilities in Vision-Language Models to Adversarial Attack

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A two-stage evaluation framework and token-projection analysis show that LVLMs encode harmful semantic cues from images even without OCR, while remaining vulnerable to cross-modal attacks.

  11. VSCBench: Bridging the Gap in Vision-Language Model Safety Calibration

    cs.IR 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A new benchmark, VSCBench, measures oversafety and undersafety in vision-language models and shows that most models, including proprietary ones, are miscalibrated on at least one safety dimension.

  12. A Multimodal Automatic Redteaming Evaluation based on Atomic Jailbreak Strategy Decoupling and Combination

    cs.CR 2026-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A new jailbreak framework, HACA, combines atomic text and image attack strategies selected by a cross-modal planner and generates attacks with LLMs and text-to-image models, reaching 95.48% average attack success acro...

  13. A Survey of Safety on Large Vision-Language Models: Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations

    cs.CR 2025-02 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A survey of LVLM safety that adds a lifecycle taxonomy and new benchmark results showing Janus-Pro-7B has weaker safety than several open-source LVLMs.

  14. When Data Manipulation Meets Attack Goals: An In-depth Survey of Attacks for VLMs

    cs.CV 2025-02 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A survey that classifies VLM attacks by goal and data manipulation strategy, and reviews defenses and metrics.

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