Rethinking Bottlenecks in Safety Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Ding, Yi, Li, Lijun, Cao, Bing, Shao, Jing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910010233061376
author Ding, Yi
Li, Lijun
Cao, Bing
Shao, Jing
author_facet Ding, Yi
Li, Lijun
Cao, Bing
Shao, Jing
contents Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their deployment in safety-critical domains poses significant challenges. Existing safety fine-tuning methods, which focus on textual or multimodal content, fall short in addressing challenging cases or disrupt the balance between helpfulness and harmlessness. Our evaluation highlights a safety reasoning gap: these methods lack safety visual reasoning ability, leading to such bottlenecks. To address this limitation and enhance both visual perception and reasoning in safety-critical contexts, we propose a novel dataset that integrates multi-image inputs with safety Chain-of-Thought (CoT) labels as fine-grained reasoning logic to improve model performance. Specifically, we introduce the Multi-Image Safety (MIS) dataset, an instruction-following dataset tailored for multi-image safety scenarios, consisting of training and test splits. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning InternVL2.5-8B with MIS significantly outperforms both powerful open-source models and API-based models in challenging multi-image tasks requiring safety-related visual reasoning. This approach not only delivers exceptional safety performance but also preserves general capabilities without any trade-offs. Specifically, fine-tuning with MIS increases average accuracy by 0.83% across five general benchmarks and reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) on multiple safety benchmarks by a large margin.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_18533
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Bottlenecks in Safety Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models
Ding, Yi
Li, Lijun
Cao, Bing
Shao, Jing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their deployment in safety-critical domains poses significant challenges. Existing safety fine-tuning methods, which focus on textual or multimodal content, fall short in addressing challenging cases or disrupt the balance between helpfulness and harmlessness. Our evaluation highlights a safety reasoning gap: these methods lack safety visual reasoning ability, leading to such bottlenecks. To address this limitation and enhance both visual perception and reasoning in safety-critical contexts, we propose a novel dataset that integrates multi-image inputs with safety Chain-of-Thought (CoT) labels as fine-grained reasoning logic to improve model performance. Specifically, we introduce the Multi-Image Safety (MIS) dataset, an instruction-following dataset tailored for multi-image safety scenarios, consisting of training and test splits. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning InternVL2.5-8B with MIS significantly outperforms both powerful open-source models and API-based models in challenging multi-image tasks requiring safety-related visual reasoning. This approach not only delivers exceptional safety performance but also preserves general capabilities without any trade-offs. Specifically, fine-tuning with MIS increases average accuracy by 0.83% across five general benchmarks and reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) on multiple safety benchmarks by a large margin.
title Rethinking Bottlenecks in Safety Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18533