The Side Effects of Being Smart: Safety Risks in MLLMs’ Multi-Image Reasoning
Renmiao Chen, Yida Lu Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Shiyao Cui, Xuan Ouyang, Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Shumin Zhang, Chengwei Pan Beihang Uinveristy, Han Qiu Tsinghua University 等 9 位作者
As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) acquire stronger reasoning capabilities to handle complex, multi-image instructions, this advancement may pose new safety risks. We study this problem by introducing MIR-SafetyBench, the first benchmark focused on multi-image reasoning safety, which consists of 2,676 instances across a taxonomy of 9 multi-image relations. Our extensive evaluations on 19 MLLMs reveal a troubling trend: models with more advanced multi-image reasoning can be more vulnerable on MIR-SafetyBench. Beyond attack success rates, we find that many responses labeled as safe are superficial, often driven by misunderstanding or evasive, non-committal replies. We further observe that unsafe generations exhibit lower attention entropy than safe ones on average. This internal signature suggests a possible risk that models may over-focus on task solving while neglecting safety constraints.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表