# Risk Awareness Injection: Calibrating Vision-Language Models for Safety without Compromising Utility

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 29 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-jailbreaks-and-adversarial-robustness/)
- LLM safety and security / [Vision-language and text-to-image safety](https://mlsanity.com/safety/vision-language-and-text-to-image-safety/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Visual Adversarial Examples Jailbreak Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13213/) (2023)
- [MM-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17600/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23661/) (2025)
- [Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02207/) (2024)
- [On the Adversarial Robustness of Multi-Modal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10741/) (2023)
- [AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09513/) (2024)
- [Eyes Closed, Safety On: Protecting Multimodal LLMs via Image-to-Text Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09572/) (2024)
- [MLLM-Protector: Ensuring MLLM's Safety without Hurting Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02906/) (2024)
- [InferAligner: Inference-Time Alignment for Harmlessness through Cross-Model Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11206/) (2024)
- [Safety of Multimodal Large Language Models on Images and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00357/) (2024)
- [On the Role of Attention Heads in Large Language Model Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13708/) (2024)
- [Word Embeddings Are Steers for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12798/) (2023)
- [Immune: Improving Safety Against Jailbreaks in Multi-modal LLMs via Inference-Time Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18688/) (2024)
- [CoCA: Regaining Safety-awareness of Multimodal Large Language Models with Constitutional Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11365/) (2024)
- [BlueSuffix: Reinforced Blue Teaming for Vision-Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20971/) (2024)
- [Video-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Video LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11842/) (2025)
- [Layer-Aware Representation Filtering: Purifying Finetuning Data to Preserve LLM Safety Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18631/) (2025)
- [The VLLM Safety Paradox: Dual Ease in Jailbreak Attack and Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08410/) (2024)
- [UniGuard: Towards Universal Safety Guardrails for Jailbreak Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01703/) (2024)
- [Understanding and Rectifying Safety Perception Distortion in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13095/) (2025)
- [Automating Steering for Safe Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13255/) (2025)
- [SafePTR: Token-Level Jailbreak Defense in Multimodal LLMs via Prune-then-Restore Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01513/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Transfer Safety Awareness for Cross-Modal Safety Drift in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02082/) (2026)
- [The Uncontrolled Variable: Vision-Language Model Refusal Responds to Image Presence in Ways Risk Cannot Explain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26174/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision language models (VLMs) extend the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to cross-modal settings, yet remain highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks. Existing defenses predominantly rely on safety fine-tuning or aggressive token manipulations, incurring substantial training costs or significantly degrading utility. Recent research shows that LLMs inherently recognize unsafe content in text, and the incorporation of visual inputs in VLMs frequently dilutes risk-related signals. Motivated by this, we propose Risk Awareness Injection (RAI), a lightweight and training-free framework for safety calibration that restores LLM-like risk recognition by amplifying unsafe signals in VLMs. Specifically, RAI constructs an Unsafe Prototype Subspace from language embeddings and performs targeted modulation on selected high-risk visual tokens, explicitly activating safety-critical signals within the cross-modal feature space. This modulation restores the model's LLM-like ability to detect unsafe content from visual inputs, while preserving the semantic integrity of original tokens for cross-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple jailbreak and utility benchmarks demonstrate that RAI substantially reduces attack success rate without compromising task performance.