MSR-Align: Policy-Grounded Multimodal Alignment for Safety-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xia, Yinan, Jiang, Yilei, Tan, Yingshui, Zhu, Xiaoyong, Yue, Xiangyu, Zheng, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xia, Yinan
Jiang, Yilei
Tan, Yingshui
Zhu, Xiaoyong
Yue, Xiangyu
Zheng, Bo
author_facet Xia, Yinan
Jiang, Yilei
Tan, Yingshui
Zhu, Xiaoyong
Yue, Xiangyu
Zheng, Bo
contents Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning tasks through enhanced chain-of-thought capabilities. However, this advancement also introduces novel safety risks, as these models become increasingly vulnerable to harmful multimodal prompts that can trigger unethical or unsafe behaviors. Existing safety alignment approaches, primarily designed for unimodal language models, fall short in addressing the complex and nuanced threats posed by multimodal inputs. Moreover, current safety datasets lack the fine-grained, policy-grounded reasoning required to robustly align reasoning-capable VLMs. In this work, we introduce {MSR-Align}, a high-quality Multimodal Safety Reasoning dataset tailored to bridge this gap. MSR-Align supports fine-grained, deliberative reasoning over standardized safety policies across both vision and text modalities. Our data generation pipeline emphasizes multimodal diversity, policy-grounded reasoning, and rigorous quality filtering using strong multimodal judges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning VLMs on MSR-Align substantially improves robustness against both textual and vision-language jailbreak attacks, while preserving or enhancing general reasoning performance. MSR-Align provides a scalable and effective foundation for advancing the safety alignment of reasoning-capable VLMs. Our dataset is made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Leigest/MSR-Align.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MSR-Align: Policy-Grounded Multimodal Alignment for Safety-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Xia, Yinan
Jiang, Yilei
Tan, Yingshui
Zhu, Xiaoyong
Yue, Xiangyu
Zheng, Bo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning tasks through enhanced chain-of-thought capabilities. However, this advancement also introduces novel safety risks, as these models become increasingly vulnerable to harmful multimodal prompts that can trigger unethical or unsafe behaviors. Existing safety alignment approaches, primarily designed for unimodal language models, fall short in addressing the complex and nuanced threats posed by multimodal inputs. Moreover, current safety datasets lack the fine-grained, policy-grounded reasoning required to robustly align reasoning-capable VLMs. In this work, we introduce {MSR-Align}, a high-quality Multimodal Safety Reasoning dataset tailored to bridge this gap. MSR-Align supports fine-grained, deliberative reasoning over standardized safety policies across both vision and text modalities. Our data generation pipeline emphasizes multimodal diversity, policy-grounded reasoning, and rigorous quality filtering using strong multimodal judges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning VLMs on MSR-Align substantially improves robustness against both textual and vision-language jailbreak attacks, while preserving or enhancing general reasoning performance. MSR-Align provides a scalable and effective foundation for advancing the safety alignment of reasoning-capable VLMs. Our dataset is made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Leigest/MSR-Align.
title MSR-Align: Policy-Grounded Multimodal Alignment for Safety-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19257