SEA: Low-Resource Safety Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models via Synthetic Embeddings

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lu, Weikai, Peng, Hao, Zhuang, Huiping, Chen, Cen, Zeng, Ziqian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Lu, Weikai
Peng, Hao
Zhuang, Huiping
Chen, Cen
Zeng, Ziqian
author_facet Lu, Weikai
Peng, Hao
Zhuang, Huiping
Chen, Cen
Zeng, Ziqian
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have serious security vulnerabilities.While safety alignment using multimodal datasets consisting of text and data of additional modalities can effectively enhance MLLM's security, it is costly to construct these datasets. Existing low-resource security alignment methods, including textual alignment, have been found to struggle with the security risks posed by additional modalities. To address this, we propose Synthetic Embedding augmented safety Alignment (SEA), which optimizes embeddings of additional modality through gradient updates to expand textual datasets. This enables multimodal safety alignment training even when only textual data is available. Extensive experiments on image, video, and audio-based MLLMs demonstrate that SEA can synthesize a high-quality embedding on a single RTX3090 GPU within 24 seconds. SEA significantly improves the security of MLLMs when faced with threats from additional modalities. To assess the security risks introduced by video and audio, we also introduced a new benchmark called VA-SafetyBench. High attack success rates across multiple MLLMs validate its challenge. Our code and data will be available at https://github.com/ZeroNLP/SEA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12562
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEA: Low-Resource Safety Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models via Synthetic Embeddings
Lu, Weikai
Peng, Hao
Zhuang, Huiping
Chen, Cen
Zeng, Ziqian
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Multimedia
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have serious security vulnerabilities.While safety alignment using multimodal datasets consisting of text and data of additional modalities can effectively enhance MLLM's security, it is costly to construct these datasets. Existing low-resource security alignment methods, including textual alignment, have been found to struggle with the security risks posed by additional modalities. To address this, we propose Synthetic Embedding augmented safety Alignment (SEA), which optimizes embeddings of additional modality through gradient updates to expand textual datasets. This enables multimodal safety alignment training even when only textual data is available. Extensive experiments on image, video, and audio-based MLLMs demonstrate that SEA can synthesize a high-quality embedding on a single RTX3090 GPU within 24 seconds. SEA significantly improves the security of MLLMs when faced with threats from additional modalities. To assess the security risks introduced by video and audio, we also introduced a new benchmark called VA-SafetyBench. High attack success rates across multiple MLLMs validate its challenge. Our code and data will be available at https://github.com/ZeroNLP/SEA.
title SEA: Low-Resource Safety Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models via Synthetic Embeddings
topic Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12562