VLMGuard-R1: Proactive Safety Alignment for VLMs via Reasoning-Driven Prompt Optimization

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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Menglan, Pang, Xianghe, Dong, Jingjing, Wang, WenHao, Du, Yaxin, Chen, Siheng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Chen, Menglan
Pang, Xianghe
Dong, Jingjing
Wang, WenHao
Du, Yaxin
Chen, Siheng
author_facet Chen, Menglan
Pang, Xianghe
Dong, Jingjing
Wang, WenHao
Du, Yaxin
Chen, Siheng
contents Aligning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with safety standards is essential to mitigate risks arising from their multimodal complexity, where integrating vision and language unveils subtle threats beyond the reach of conventional safeguards. Inspired by the insight that reasoning across modalities is key to preempting intricate vulnerabilities, we propose a novel direction for VLM safety: multimodal reasoning-driven prompt rewriting. To this end, we introduce VLMGuard-R1, a proactive framework that refines user inputs through a reasoning-guided rewriter, dynamically interpreting text-image interactions to deliver refined prompts that bolster safety across diverse VLM architectures without altering their core parameters. To achieve this, we devise a three-stage reasoning pipeline to synthesize a dataset that trains the rewriter to infer subtle threats, enabling tailored, actionable responses over generic refusals. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks with five VLMs reveal that VLMGuard-R1 outperforms four baselines. In particular, VLMGuard-R1 achieves a remarkable 43.59\% increase in average safety across five models on the SIUO benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12661
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VLMGuard-R1: Proactive Safety Alignment for VLMs via Reasoning-Driven Prompt Optimization
Chen, Menglan
Pang, Xianghe
Dong, Jingjing
Wang, WenHao
Du, Yaxin
Chen, Siheng
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Aligning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with safety standards is essential to mitigate risks arising from their multimodal complexity, where integrating vision and language unveils subtle threats beyond the reach of conventional safeguards. Inspired by the insight that reasoning across modalities is key to preempting intricate vulnerabilities, we propose a novel direction for VLM safety: multimodal reasoning-driven prompt rewriting. To this end, we introduce VLMGuard-R1, a proactive framework that refines user inputs through a reasoning-guided rewriter, dynamically interpreting text-image interactions to deliver refined prompts that bolster safety across diverse VLM architectures without altering their core parameters. To achieve this, we devise a three-stage reasoning pipeline to synthesize a dataset that trains the rewriter to infer subtle threats, enabling tailored, actionable responses over generic refusals. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks with five VLMs reveal that VLMGuard-R1 outperforms four baselines. In particular, VLMGuard-R1 achieves a remarkable 43.59\% increase in average safety across five models on the SIUO benchmark.
title VLMGuard-R1: Proactive Safety Alignment for VLMs via Reasoning-Driven Prompt Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12661