# Seeing Through Conflicts: Improving Instruction Hierarchy Alignment in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22234 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22234/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 31 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13208/) (2024)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00849/) (2023)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14470/) (2024)
- [MM-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17600/) (2023)
- [Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02207/) (2024)
- [Images are Achilles' Heel of Alignment: Exploiting Visual Vulnerabilities for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09792/) (2024)
- [Llama Guard 3 Vision: Safeguarding Human-AI Image Understanding Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10414/) (2024)
- [SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04957/) (2025)
- [SPA-VL: A Comprehensive Safety Preference Alignment Dataset for Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12030/) (2024)
- [Instructional Segment Embedding: Improving LLM Safety with Instruction Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09102/) (2024)
- [Jailbreak Large Vision-Language Models Through Multi-Modal Linkage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00473/) (2024)
- [IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08745/) (2025)
- [LlavaGuard: An Open VLM-based Framework for Safeguarding Vision Datasets and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05113/) (2024)
- [MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17520/) (2024)
- [VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13649/) (2024)
- [GuardReasoner-VL: Safeguarding VLMs via Reinforced Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11049/) (2025)
- [SysBench: Can Large Language Models Follow System Messages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10943/) (2024)
- [IH-Challenge: A Training Dataset to Improve Instruction Hierarchy on Frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10521/) (2026)
- [Are Vision-Language Models Safe in the Wild? A Meme-Based Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15389/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction hierarchy (IH) alignment teaches language models to prioritize higher-level instructions when inputs conflict. While studied primarily in text-only settings, vision-language models (VLMs) introduce new challenges for IH: instructions may be embedded in images, split across modalities, visually transformed, or encountered during agentic tasks. Positing multimodal IH alignment as a reasoning problem, we train VLMs using reinforcement learning with rule-based rewards, comparing text-only, image-only, and mixed-modality supervision. We find that text-only IH training partially transfers to multimodal attacks, failing when models must decode, reconstruct, or reason over instructions across modalities. Image-based training improves robustness beyond text-only supervision, while mixed-modality training performs best overall. Importantly, the benefits generalize beyond the synthetic typographic training setting to real-image and web-agent safety tasks, while largely preserving general multimodal capability, showing that lightweight, verifiable supervision can meaningfully improve VLM robustness under adversarial, cross-modal, and interactive instruction conflicts.