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HiddenDetect: Detecting Jailbreak Attacks against Large Vision-Language Models via Monitoring Hidden States

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arxiv 2502.14744 v4 pith:UBFUKC2Y submitted 2025-02-20 cs.CL

HiddenDetect: Detecting Jailbreak Attacks against Large Vision-Language Models via Monitoring Hidden States

classification cs.CL
keywords lvlmshiddendetectattacksjailbreaksafetyactivationsdetectinginternal
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The integration of additional modalities increases the susceptibility of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to safety risks, such as jailbreak attacks, compared to their language-only counterparts. While existing research primarily focuses on post-hoc alignment techniques, the underlying safety mechanisms within LVLMs remain largely unexplored. In this work , we investigate whether LVLMs inherently encode safety-relevant signals within their internal activations during inference. Our findings reveal that LVLMs exhibit distinct activation patterns when processing unsafe prompts, which can be leveraged to detect and mitigate adversarial inputs without requiring extensive fine-tuning. Building on this insight, we introduce HiddenDetect, a novel tuning-free framework that harnesses internal model activations to enhance safety. Experimental results show that {HiddenDetect} surpasses state-of-the-art methods in detecting jailbreak attacks against LVLMs. By utilizing intrinsic safety-aware patterns, our method provides an efficient and scalable solution for strengthening LVLM robustness against multimodal threats. Our code will be released publicly at https://github.com/leigest519/HiddenDetect.

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Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. V-DEAL: Diagnosing Video Safety De-Calibration as an Understanding-Refusal Coupling Failure

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Video LLMs understand harmful content but activate weaker refusal signals when the query is benign; prompt realignment reduces attack success from ~48% to ~1%.

  2. Breaking Refusal in the First Half: A Mechanistic Study of the Prefill Jailbreak

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Refusal under a prefill jailbreak is a shallow response-site computation: the harm representation stays intact, the failure lives in an early response window, and the dominant mechanism is passive autoregressive conditioning.

  3. Defending Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Manifold Trajectory Kinetics

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MTK detects jailbreaks by monitoring the evolution of prompt neighborhood structures on the data manifold through LLM layers, reporting 95% TPR at 5% FPR on benign and 2% on pseudo-malicious prompts plus 85% TPR under...

  4. Revisiting JBShield: Breaking and Rebuilding Representation-Level Jailbreak Defenses

    cs.CR 2026-05 accept novelty 6.0

    JBShield is vulnerable to adaptive JB-GCG attacks (up to 53% ASR) because jailbreak representations occupy a distinct region in refusal-direction space; the new RTV defense using Mahalanobis detection on multi-layer f...

  5. Adaptively Robust LLM Monitoring via Activation Watermarking

    cs.CR 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    Activation Watermarking embeds a secret keyed direction in an LLM's hidden states so policy-violating responses can be detected by a cosine test, cutting adaptive-jailbreak evasion relative to guard models.

  6. The Impact of Off-Policy Training Data on Probe Generalisation

    cs.AI 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Off-policy training data for LLM behavior probes causes significant generalization failures especially for intent-based behaviors like deception, and performance on coerced incentivised data correlates with real on-po...

  7. Do Linear Probes Generalize Better in Persona Coordinates?

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Persona axes derived from contrastive prompts and PCA yield linear probes that generalize better than raw-activation probes across 10 datasets for deception and sycophancy.

  8. Do Linear Probes Generalize Better in Persona Coordinates?

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Probes on persona principal components from contrastive prompts generalize better than raw activation probes for harmful behaviors across 10 datasets.

  9. SALLIE: Safeguarding Against Latent Language & Image Exploits

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SALLIE detects jailbreaks in text and vision-language models by extracting residual stream activations, scoring maliciousness per layer with k-NN, and ensembling predictions, outperforming baselines on multiple datasets.