# Multimodal Situational Safety

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06172/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [A Survey of Safety on Large Vision-Language Models: Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14881/) (2025)
- [VPI-Bench: Visual Prompt Injection Attacks for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02456/) (2025)
- [IS-Bench: Evaluating Interactive Safety of VLM-Driven Embodied Agents in Daily Household Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16402/) (2025)
- [Safety Guardrails for LLM-Enabled Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07885/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Bottlenecks in Safety Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18533/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents: Foundations, Emerging Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05073/) (2026)
- [Think in Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Collapse in Multimodal Large Reasoning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06538/) (2025)
- [SafeMind: Benchmarking and Mitigating Safety Risks in Embodied LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25885/) (2025)
- [Safety Mirage: How Spurious Correlations Undermine VLM Safety Fine-Tuning and Can Be Mitigated by Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11832/) (2025)
- [Can AI Perceive Physical Danger and Intervene?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21651/) (2025)
- [Generative RLHF-V: Learning Principles from Multi-modal Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18531/) (2025)
- [USB: A Comprehensive and Unified Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23793/) (2025)
- [SaFeR-VLM: Toward Safety-aware Fine-grained Reasoning in Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06871/) (2025)
- [Praxis-VLM: Vision-Grounded Decision Making via Text-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16965/) (2025)
- [HoliSafe: Holistic Safety Benchmarking and Modeling for Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04704/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Cultural Safety: Evaluation Framework and Alignment Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14972/) (2025)
- [AccidentBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning in Vehicle Accidents and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26636/) (2025)
- [ShieldVLM: Safeguarding the Multimodal Implicit Toxicity via Deliberative Reasoning with LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14035/) (2025)
- [Steering Multimodal Large Language Models Decoding for Context-Aware Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19212/) (2025)
- [Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17455/) (2025)
- [Towards Policy-Adaptive Image Guardrail: Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01228/) (2026)
- [Seeing the Threat: Vulnerabilities in Vision-Language Models to Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21967/) (2025)
- [HomeGuard: VLM-based Embodied Safeguard for Identifying Contextual Risk in Household Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14367/) (2026)
- [Evolving Contextual Safety in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Inference-Time Self-Reflective Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15800/) (2026)
- [PandaGuard: Systematic Evaluation of LLM Safety against Jailbreaking Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13862/) (2025)
- [SAVeS: Steering Safety Judgments in Vision-Language Models via Semantic Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19092/) (2026)
- [Beyond Jailbreaks: Revealing Stealthier and Broader LLM Security Risks Stemming from Alignment Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07402/) (2025)
- [SafeCoT: Improving VLM Safety with Minimal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08399/) (2025)
- [SIA: Enhancing Safety via Intent Awareness for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16856/) (2025)
- [Protect: Towards Robust Guardrailing Stack for Trustworthy Enterprise LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13351/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are rapidly evolving, demonstrating impressive capabilities as multimodal assistants that interact with both humans and their environments. However, this increased sophistication introduces significant safety concerns. In this paper, we present the first evaluation and analysis of a novel safety challenge termed Multimodal Situational Safety, which explores how safety considerations vary based on the specific situation in which the user or agent is engaged. We argue that for an MLLM to respond safely, whether through language or action, it often needs to assess the safety implications of a language query within its corresponding visual context. To evaluate this capability, we develop the Multimodal Situational Safety benchmark (MSSBench) to assess the situational safety performance of current MLLMs. The dataset comprises 1,820 language query-image pairs, half of which the image context is safe, and the other half is unsafe. We also develop an evaluation framework that analyzes key safety aspects, including explicit safety reasoning, visual understanding, and, crucially, situational safety reasoning. Our findings reveal that current MLLMs struggle with this nuanced safety problem in the instruction-following setting and struggle to tackle these situational safety challenges all at once, highlighting a key area for future research. Furthermore, we develop multi-agent pipelines to coordinately solve safety challenges, which shows consistent improvement in safety over the original MLLM response. Code and data: mssbench.github.io.