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Last analyzed Sep 9, 2026

Language Model Security Database

985 research findings · 1119 evaluated models

Filtered research findings

12 entries

Matches every word across titles, descriptions, sources, affected systems, and models.

Selective refusal gaps in visual question answering

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

KoNA measures whether vision-language models answer valid image questions while refusing unsafe components or correcting unsupported premises. Its 9,300 question-answer pairs include mixed and fully answerable controls.

Knowing What Not to Answer: Selective Non-Compliance in Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: InternVL3 2B Instruct, InternVL3-78B-Instruct, Qwen 2.5 VL 3B Instruct+5 more
  • InternVL3 2B Instruct
  • InternVL3-78B-Instruct
  • Qwen 2.5 VL 3B Instruct
  • Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct
  • GPT-5
  • Gemini 2.5 Flash
  • InternVL3-2B-KoNA
  • Qwen2.5-VL-3B-KoNA

Discrete Token Subversion

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Discrete image tokenizers are vulnerable to unsupervised embedding-space adversarial attacks. Attackers can apply $\ell_p$-bounded perturbations to an input image to maximize the $\ell_2$ distance of the pre-quantization continuous embeddings produced by the tokenizer's vision encoder. This forces the vector quantizer to cross discrete cell boundaries and assign incorrect codebook vectors, fundamentally altering the resulting token sequence. Because the attack targets the pre-quantization…

On the Adversarial Robustness of Discrete Image Tokenizers
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B

Reward Hacking Via Adversarial Imitation

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

A vulnerability exists in the post-training alignment of Flow Matching models (specifically FLUX.1-dev) when utilizing Visual Foundation Models (VFM) (e.g., DINOv3b) as discriminators or when employing standalone Reward Gradient optimization (e.g., HPSv3). These feedback mechanisms lack sufficient capacity or structural guidance to constrain the generative policy, making the discriminator's gradients susceptible to "reward hacking." Consequently, the generative policy over-optimizes for the…

FAIL: Flow Matching Adversarial Imitation Learning for Image Generation
Evaluated models: Not reported

Semantic Ensembles Fool CLIP

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to semantic-ensemble adversarial attacks. Current adversarial fine-tuning defenses for CLIP rely on minimizing the cosine similarity between an image and a single hand-crafted template (e.g., "A photo of a {label}"). This creates a vulnerability where adversarial examples (AEs) overfit to specific phrasings rather than the core class semantics. Attackers can bypass these defenses by generating semantic-aware adversarial…

Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-tuning for CLIP
Evaluated models: CLIP ViT-B/32

Early Reasoning Safety Degradation

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training for explicit chain-of-thought reasoning (e.g., GRPO) in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) inadvertently degrades safety alignment, rendering the models highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks. The vulnerability is caused by "conditional coverage collapse" during the initial phases of chain-of-thought generation. Under adversarial conditioning (text or image), the reasoning policy assigns vanishing probability mass to safe…

Safety Recovery in Reasoning Models Is Only a Few Early Steering Steps Away
Evaluated models: R1-Onevision 7B, OpenVLThinker 7B, VLAA-Thinker 7B+3 more
  • R1-Onevision 7B
  • OpenVLThinker 7B
  • VLAA-Thinker 7B
  • Vision-R1 7B
  • LlamaV-o1
  • LLaVA-CoT

VLM Split-Image Blindspot

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Vision Language Models (VLMs) utilizing independent vision encoders (e.g., ViT) and Large Language Model (LLM) decoders are vulnerable to Split-Image Visual Jailbreak Attacks (SIVA). The vulnerability arises from an architectural and alignment discrepancy: while the vision encoder processes image fragments (splits) in isolation via constrained attention or block-diagonal masks, the LLM decoder aggregates these features via cross-attention to reconstruct the semantic content. Current safety…

Robustness of Vision Language Models Against Split-Image Harmful Input Attacks
Evaluated models: Llama 3.2 11B

Synchronized Multimodal Steering

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Multimodal Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems (MLLM-RecSys) are vulnerable to Cross-Modal Interactive Data Poisoning. Attackers can manipulate the system by injecting compromised user-generated content (UGC) that contains synchronized, coupled perturbations across both textual and visual modalities. While MLLMs naturally filter out single-modality noise via cross-modal consensus, this vulnerability exploits the consensus mechanism itself. By leveraging cross-modal attention to…

VENOMREC: Cross-Modal Interactive Poisoning for Targeted Promotion in Multimodal LLM Recommender Systems
Evaluated models: Not reported

Simulated Ensemble Jailbreak Transfer

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

A vulnerability exists in the fine-tuning lifecycle of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) derived from open-source base models, termed the "grey-box threat." Adversaries with white-box access to a public base model (e.g., Qwen2-VL) can generate universal adversarial images that successfully bypass safety guardrails in proprietary, fine-tuned downstream variants. This is achieved via the Simulated Ensemble Attack (SEA), which combines two techniques: Fine-tuning Trajectory Simulation (FTS), where…

Simulated Ensemble Attack: Transferring Jailbreaks Across Fine-tuned Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen 2 2B

Benign LLM Secondary Risks

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to "Secondary Risks," a class of non-adversarial failures where the model generates harmful, misleading, or unsafe outputs in response to benign, non-malicious user prompts. Unlike jailbreaks which require adversarial inputs, secondary risks arise from imperfect generalization and alignment failures during standard interactions. This vulnerability manifests primarily in two primitives: 1. Excessive…

Exploring the Secondary Risks of Large Language Models
Evaluated models: GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4 Turbo+9 more
  • GPT-4o
  • Claude 3.7 Sonnet
  • GPT-4 Turbo
  • Gemini 2.0 Pro
  • DeepSeek V3
  • Llama 3.3 70B
  • Qwen 2.5 32B
  • Phi-4
  • Gemma 2 27B IT
  • LLaVA OneVision Qwen2 72B
  • Pixtral 12B
  • MiniCPM-o 2.6

Image-Text Jailbreak

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to coupled cross-modal jailbreak attacks that combine continuous visual perturbations with discrete textual manipulations. Because standard alignment and single-modality defenses (such as text-only safety tuning or isolated vision-encoder adversarial training) fail to secure the cross-modal interaction, attackers can simultaneously apply gradient-based noise (e.g., PGD) to input images and adversarial suffixes (e.g., GCG) to text prompts…

E2AT: Multimodal Jailbreak Defense via Dynamic Joint Optimization for Multimodal Large Language Models
Evaluated models: LLaVA 1.5 7B, Bunny 1.0 4B, Mplug-owl2

Research methodology

Entries summarize publicly available primary-source security research. Model names reflect only systems explicitly evaluated by the cited paper, and measurements are research-reported unless independent verification is stated.

Discovery and publication are separate: new papers enter a candidate queue, then require human review and explicit approval before publication. Updates follow that review process, not a guaranteed daily publishing schedule. “Last analyzed” is the newest analysis date among published entries; it does not mean that all recent research has been covered.