Internal Activation Revision: Safeguarding Vision Language Models Without Parameter Update
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Warning: This paper contains offensive content that may disturb some readers. Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal capabilities but have been found to be more susceptible to generating harmful content compared to their backbone large language models (LLMs). Our investigation reveals that the integration of images significantly shifts the model's internal activations during the forward pass, diverging from those triggered by textual input. Moreover, the safety alignments of LLMs embedded within VLMs are not sufficiently robust to handle the activations discrepancies, making the models vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. To address this issue, we propose an internal activation revision approach that efficiently revises activations during generation, steering the model toward safer outputs. Our framework incorporates revisions at both the layer and head levels, offering control over the model's generation at varying levels of granularity. In addition, we explore three strategies for constructing positive and negative samples and two approaches for extracting revision vectors, resulting in different variants of our method. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the internal activation revision method significantly improves the safety of widely used VLMs, reducing attack success rates by an average of 48.94%, 34.34%, 43.92%, and 52.98% on SafeBench, Safe-Unsafe, Unsafe, and MM-SafetyBench, respectively, while minimally impacting model helpfulness.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it