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Abstract
With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)
for visual-reasoning tasks, improving their safety has become crucial. Recent
research indicates that despite training-time safety alignment, these models
remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. In this work, we first highlight an
important safety gap to describe that alignment achieved solely through safety
training may be insufficient against jailbreak attacks. To address this
vulnerability, we propose Immune, an inference-time defense framework that
leverages a safe reward model through controlled decoding to defend against
jailbreak attacks. Additionally, we provide a mathematical characterization of
Immune, offering insights on why it improves safety against jailbreaks.
Extensive evaluations on diverse jailbreak benchmarks using recent MLLMs reveal
that Immune effectively enhances model safety while preserving the model's
original capabilities. For instance, against text-based jailbreak attacks on
LLaVA-1.6, Immune reduces the attack success rate by 57.82% and 16.78% compared
to the base MLLM and state-of-the-art defense strategy, respectively.