SIA: Enhancing Safety via Intent Awareness for Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Na, Youngjin, Jeong, Sangheon, Lee, Youngwan, Lee, Jian, Jeong, Dawoon, Kim, Youngman
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Na, Youngjin
Jeong, Sangheon
Lee, Youngwan
Lee, Jian
Jeong, Dawoon
Kim, Youngman
author_facet Na, Youngjin
Jeong, Sangheon
Lee, Youngwan
Lee, Jian
Jeong, Dawoon
Kim, Youngman
contents With the growing deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world applications, previously overlooked safety risks are becoming increasingly evident. In particular, seemingly innocuous multimodal inputs can combine to reveal harmful intent, leading to unsafe model outputs. While multimodal safety has received increasing attention, existing approaches often fail to address such latent risks, especially when harmfulness arises only from the interaction between modalities. We propose SIA (Safety via Intent Awareness), a training-free, intent-aware safety framework that proactively detects harmful intent in multimodal inputs and uses it to guide the generation of safe responses. SIA follows a three-stage process: (1) visual abstraction via captioning; (2) intent inference through few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting; and (3) intent-conditioned response generation. By dynamically adapting to the implicit intent inferred from an image-text pair, SIA mitigates harmful outputs without extensive retraining. Extensive experiments on safety benchmarks, including SIUO, MM-SafetyBench, and HoliSafe, show that SIA consistently improves safety and outperforms prior training-free methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_16856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SIA: Enhancing Safety via Intent Awareness for Vision-Language Models
Na, Youngjin
Jeong, Sangheon
Lee, Youngwan
Lee, Jian
Jeong, Dawoon
Kim, Youngman
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
With the growing deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world applications, previously overlooked safety risks are becoming increasingly evident. In particular, seemingly innocuous multimodal inputs can combine to reveal harmful intent, leading to unsafe model outputs. While multimodal safety has received increasing attention, existing approaches often fail to address such latent risks, especially when harmfulness arises only from the interaction between modalities. We propose SIA (Safety via Intent Awareness), a training-free, intent-aware safety framework that proactively detects harmful intent in multimodal inputs and uses it to guide the generation of safe responses. SIA follows a three-stage process: (1) visual abstraction via captioning; (2) intent inference through few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting; and (3) intent-conditioned response generation. By dynamically adapting to the implicit intent inferred from an image-text pair, SIA mitigates harmful outputs without extensive retraining. Extensive experiments on safety benchmarks, including SIUO, MM-SafetyBench, and HoliSafe, show that SIA consistently improves safety and outperforms prior training-free methods.
title SIA: Enhancing Safety via Intent Awareness for Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16856