Title: Misaligned Roles, Misplaced Images: Structural Input Perturbations Expose Multimodal Alignment Blind Spots
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: Safety and Robustness, Safety Alignment, Interpretability, Refusal, out-of-distribution, Representation Engineering, Jailbreaking, Multimodal Alignment, Concept Vectors

Abstract: Multimodal Language Models (MMLMs) typically undergo post-training alignment to prevent harmful content generation. However, these alignment stages focus primarily on the assistant role, leaving the user role unaligned, and sticking to a fixed input prompt structure of special tokens, making the model vulnerable when inputs deviate from these expectations. We introduce Role-Modality Attacks (RMA), a novel class of adversarial attacks that exploit role confusion between the user and assistant and alter the position of the image token to elicit harmful outputs. Unlike existing attacks that modify query content, RMAs manipulate the input structure without altering the query itself. We systematically evaluate these attacks across multiple Vision Language Models (VLMs) on eight distinct settings, showing that they can be composed to create stronger adversarial prompts, as also evidenced by their increased projection in the negative refusal direction in the residual stream, a property observed in prior successful attacks. Finally, for mitigation, we propose an adversarial training approach that makes the model robust against input prompt perturbations. By training the model on a range of harmful and benign prompts all perturbed with different RMA settings, the model loses its sensitivity to Role Confusion and Modality Manipulation attacks and is trained to only pay attention to the content of the query in the input prompt structure, effectively reducing Attack Success Rate (ASR) while preserving the model’s general utility.

TL;DR: We introduce Role-Modality Attacks (RMA), where uneven role alignment (user-assistant) and image token positioning bypass refusal. We analyze them via interpretability in activation space and propose an adversarial training approach for mitigation.