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Abstract
Recent studies reveal that integrating new modalities into Large Language
Models (LLMs), such as Vision-Language Models (VLMs), creates a new attack
surface that bypasses existing safety training techniques like Supervised
Fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). While
further SFT and RLHF-based safety training can be conducted in multi-modal
settings, collecting multi-modal training datasets poses a significant
challenge. Inspired by the structural design of recent multi-modal models,
where, regardless of the combination of input modalities, all inputs are
ultimately fused into the language space, we aim to explore whether unlearning
solely in the textual domain can be effective for cross-modality safety
alignment. Our evaluation across six datasets empirically demonstrates the
transferability -- textual unlearning in VLMs significantly reduces the Attack
Success Rate (ASR) to less than 8\% and in some cases, even as low as nearly
2\% for both text-based and vision-text-based attacks, alongside preserving the
utility. Moreover, our experiments show that unlearning with a multi-modal
dataset offers no potential benefits but incurs significantly increased
computational demands, possibly up to 6 times higher.