SaFeR-VLM: Toward Safety-aware Fine-grained Reasoning in Multimodal Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06871v2
• Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:46:31 GMT
• Title: SaFeR-VLM: Toward Safety-aware Fine-grained Reasoning in Multimodal Models
• Authors: Huahui Yi, Kun Wang, Qiankun Li, Miao Yu, Liang Lin, Gongli Xi, Hao Wu, Xuming Hu, Kang Li, Yang Liu,
• Abstract summary: Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) demonstrate impressive crossmodal reasoning but often amplify safety risks under adversarial prompts.<n> Existing defenses mainly act at the output level and do not constrain the reasoning process, leaving models to implicit risks.<n>We propose SaFeR-VLM, which integrates four components and supports dynamic and interpretable safety decisions beyond surface-level filtering.
• Score: 66.71948519280669
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning but often amplify safety risks under adversarial or unsafe prompts, a phenomenon we call the \textit{Reasoning Tax}. Existing defenses mainly act at the output level and do not constrain the reasoning process, leaving models exposed to implicit risks. In this paper, we propose SaFeR-VLM, a safety-aligned reinforcement learning framework that embeds safety directly into multimodal reasoning. The framework integrates four components: (I) QI-Safe-10K, a curated dataset emphasizing safety-critical and reasoning-sensitive cases; (II) safety-aware rollout, where unsafe generations undergo reflection and correction instead of being discarded; (III) structured reward modeling with multi-dimensional weighted criteria and explicit penalties for hallucinations and contradictions; and (IV) GRPO optimization, which reinforces both safe and corrected trajectories. This unified design shifts safety from a passive safeguard to an active driver of reasoning, enabling scalable and generalizable safety-aware reasoning. SaFeR-VLM further demonstrates robustness against both explicit and implicit risks, supporting dynamic and interpretable safety decisions beyond surface-level filtering. SaFeR-VLM-3B achieves average performance $70.13$ and $78.97$ on safety and helpfulness across six benchmarks, surpassing both same-scale and $>10\times$ larger models such as Skywork-R1V3-38B, Qwen2.5VL-72B, and GLM4.5V-106B. Remarkably, SaFeR-VLM-7B benefits from its increased scale to surpass GPT-5-mini and Gemini-2.5-Flash by \num{6.47} and \num{16.76} points respectively on safety metrics, achieving this improvement without any degradation in helpfulness performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HarveyYi/SaFeR-VLM.

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