Think-Reflect-Revise: A Policy-Guided Reflective Framework for Safety Alignment in Large Vision Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Weng, Fenghua, Lu, Chaochao, Hu, Xia, Shao, Wenqi, Wang, Wenjie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Weng, Fenghua
Lu, Chaochao
Hu, Xia
Shao, Wenqi
Wang, Wenjie
author_facet Weng, Fenghua
Lu, Chaochao
Hu, Xia
Shao, Wenqi
Wang, Wenjie
contents As multimodal reasoning improves the overall capabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), recent studies have begun to explore safety-oriented reasoning, aiming to enhance safety awareness by analyzing potential safety risks during the reasoning process before generating the final response. Although such approaches improve safety awareness and interpretability, this single-pass think-then-answer paradigm remains vulnerable to contextual or visual jailbreak attacks. This reveals a critical flaw: single-pass reasoning may overlook explicit harmful content in its own output. Our key insight is to exploit this wasted signal through reflection, which can effectively leverage the malicious content revealed in the first-pass reasoning to enable genuine self-correction and prevent unsafe generations. Motivated by this, we propose Think-Reflect-Revise (TRR), a three-stage training framework designed to enhance the safety alignment of LVLMs through policy-guided self-reflection. We first build a Reflective Safety Reasoning (ReSafe) dataset with 5,000 examples that follow a think-reflect-revise process. We then fine-tune the target model using the ReSafe dataset to initialize reflective behavior, and finally reinforce policy-guided reflection through reinforcement learning. Experimental results show that TRR substantially improves the safety performance of LVLMs across both safety-awareness benchmarks and jailbreak attack evaluations, increasing the overall safe response rate from 42.8% to 87.7% on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, while preserving stable performance on general benchmarks such as MMMU and MMStar. The project page is available at https://think-reflect-revise.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07141
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think-Reflect-Revise: A Policy-Guided Reflective Framework for Safety Alignment in Large Vision Language Models
Weng, Fenghua
Lu, Chaochao
Hu, Xia
Shao, Wenqi
Wang, Wenjie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
As multimodal reasoning improves the overall capabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), recent studies have begun to explore safety-oriented reasoning, aiming to enhance safety awareness by analyzing potential safety risks during the reasoning process before generating the final response. Although such approaches improve safety awareness and interpretability, this single-pass think-then-answer paradigm remains vulnerable to contextual or visual jailbreak attacks. This reveals a critical flaw: single-pass reasoning may overlook explicit harmful content in its own output. Our key insight is to exploit this wasted signal through reflection, which can effectively leverage the malicious content revealed in the first-pass reasoning to enable genuine self-correction and prevent unsafe generations. Motivated by this, we propose Think-Reflect-Revise (TRR), a three-stage training framework designed to enhance the safety alignment of LVLMs through policy-guided self-reflection. We first build a Reflective Safety Reasoning (ReSafe) dataset with 5,000 examples that follow a think-reflect-revise process. We then fine-tune the target model using the ReSafe dataset to initialize reflective behavior, and finally reinforce policy-guided reflection through reinforcement learning. Experimental results show that TRR substantially improves the safety performance of LVLMs across both safety-awareness benchmarks and jailbreak attack evaluations, increasing the overall safe response rate from 42.8% to 87.7% on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, while preserving stable performance on general benchmarks such as MMMU and MMStar. The project page is available at https://think-reflect-revise.github.io/.
title Think-Reflect-Revise: A Policy-Guided Reflective Framework for Safety Alignment in Large Vision Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07141