GeoSense: Evaluating Identification and Application of Geometric Principles in Multimodal Reasoning

Geometry problem-solving (GPS), a challenging task requiring both visual comprehension and symbolic reasoning, effectively measures the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Humans exhibit strong reasoning ability in this task through accurate identification and adaptive application of geometric principles within visual contexts. However, existing benchmarks fail to jointly assess both dimensions of the human-like geometric reasoning mechanism in MLLMs, remaining a critical gap in assessing their ability to tackle GPS. To this end, we introduce GeoSense, the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the geometric reasoning abilities of MLLMs through the lens of geometric principles. GeoSense features a five-level hierarchical framework of geometric principles spanning plane and solid geometry, an intricately annotated dataset of 1,789 problems, and an innovative evaluation strategy. Through extensive experiments on GeoSense with various open-source and closed-source MLLMs, we observe that Gemini-2.0-pro-flash performs best, achieving an overall score of $65.3$. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the identification and application of geometric principles remain a bottleneck for leading MLLMs, jointly hindering their reasoning abilities. These findings underscore GeoSense's potential to guide future advancements in MLLMs' geometric reasoning capabilities, paving the way for more robust and human-like reasoning in artificial intelligence.

MMKB-RAG: A Multi-Modal Knowledge-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal LLMs have been remarkable. However, these models still rely solely on their parametric knowledge, which limits their ability to generate up-to-date information and increases the risk of producing erroneous content. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) partially mitigates these challenges by incorporating external data sources, yet the reliance on databases and retrieval systems can introduce irrelevant or inaccurate documents, ultimately undermining both performance and reasoning quality. In this paper, we propose Multi-Modal Knowledge-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MMKB-RAG), a novel multi-modal RAG framework that leverages the inherent knowledge boundaries of models to dynamically generate semantic tags for the retrieval process. This strategy enables the joint filtering of retrieved documents, retaining only the most relevant and accurate references. Extensive experiments on knowledge-based visual question-answering tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach: on the E-VQA dataset, our method improves performance by +4.2% on the Single-Hop subset and +0.4% on the full dataset, while on the InfoSeek dataset, it achieves gains of +7.8% on the Unseen-Q subset, +8.2% on the Unseen-E subset, and +8.1% on the full dataset. These results highlight significant enhancements in both accuracy and robustness over the current state-of-the-art MLLM and RAG frameworks.

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

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.

ChineseSimpleVQA -- "See the World, Discover Knowledge": A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models

The evaluation of factual accuracy in large vision language models (LVLMs) has lagged behind their rapid development, making it challenging to fully reflect these models' knowledge capacity and reliability. In this paper, we introduce the first factuality-based visual question-answering benchmark in Chinese, named ChineseSimpleVQA, aimed at assessing the visual factuality of LVLMs across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics. The key features of this benchmark include a focus on the Chinese language, diverse knowledge types, a multi-hop question construction, high-quality data, static consistency, and easy-to-evaluate through short answers. Moreover, we contribute a rigorous data construction pipeline and decouple the visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world (i.e., object recognition) and discovering knowledge. This decoupling allows us to analyze the capability boundaries and execution mechanisms of LVLMs. Subsequently, we evaluate 34 advanced open-source and closed-source models, revealing critical performance gaps within this field.

Equilibrate RLHF: Towards Balancing Helpfulness-Safety Trade-off in Large Language Models

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) based on human preferences, commonly achieved through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has been effective in improving their performance. However, maintaining LLM safety throughout the fine-tuning process remains a significant challenge, as resolving conflicts between safety and helpfulness can be non-trivial. Typically, the safety alignment of LLM is trained on data with safety-related categories. However, our experiments find that naively increasing the scale of safety training data usually leads the LLMs to an ``overly safe'' state rather than a ``truly safe'' state, boosting the refusal rate through extensive safety-aligned data without genuinely understanding the requirements for safe responses. Such an approach can inadvertently diminish the models' helpfulness. To understand the phenomenon, we first investigate the role of safety data by categorizing them into three different groups, and observe that each group behaves differently as training data scales up. To boost the balance between safety and helpfulness, we propose an Equilibrate RLHF framework including a Fine-grained Data-centric (FDC) approach that achieves better safety alignment even with fewer training data, and an Adaptive Message-wise Alignment (AMA) approach, which selectively highlight the key segments through a gradient masking strategy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the safety alignment of LLMs while balancing safety and helpfulness.

Enhancing Vision-Language Model Safety through Progressive Concept-Bottleneck-Driven Alignment

Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-trained visual encoder models connected to LLMs form Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, recent research shows that the visual modality in VLMs is highly vulnerable, allowing attackers to bypass safety alignment in LLMs through visually transmitted content, launching harmful attacks. To address this challenge, we propose a progressive concept-based alignment strategy, PSA-VLM, which incorporates safety modules as concept bottlenecks to enhance visual modality safety alignment. By aligning model predictions with specific safety concepts, we improve defenses against risky images, enhancing explainability and controllability while minimally impacting general performance. Our method is obtained through two-stage training. The low computational cost of the first stage brings very effective performance improvement, and the fine-tuning of the language model in the second stage further improves the safety performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on popular VLM safety benchmark.

Chinese SimpleQA: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Language Models

New LLM evaluation benchmarks are important to align with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we present Chinese SimpleQA, the first comprehensive Chinese benchmark to evaluate the factuality ability of language models to answer short questions, and Chinese SimpleQA mainly has five properties (i.e., Chinese, Diverse, High-quality, Static, Easy-to-evaluate). Specifically, first, we focus on the Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics. Second, we conduct a comprehensive quality control process to achieve high-quality questions and answers, where the reference answers are static and cannot be changed over time. Third, following SimpleQA, the questions and answers are very short, and the grading process is easy-to-evaluate based on OpenAI API. Based on Chinese SimpleQA, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on the factuality abilities of existing LLMs. Finally, we hope that Chinese SimpleQA could guide the developers to better understand the Chinese factuality abilities of their models and facilitate the growth of foundation models.

Safety Alignment for Vision Language Models

Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-trained visual encoder models connected to an LLMs can realize Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, existing research shows that the visual modality of VLMs is vulnerable, with attackers easily bypassing LLMs' safety alignment through visual modality features to launch attacks. To address this issue, we enhance the existing VLMs' visual modality safety alignment by adding safety modules, including a safety projector, safety tokens, and a safety head, through a two-stage training process, effectively improving the model's defense against risky images. For example, building upon the LLaVA-v1.5 model, we achieve a safety score of 8.26, surpassing the GPT-4V on the Red Teaming Visual Language Models (RTVLM) benchmark. Our method boasts ease of use, high flexibility, and strong controllability, and it enhances safety while having minimal impact on the model's general performance. Moreover, our alignment strategy also uncovers some possible risky content within commonly used open-source multimodal datasets. Our code will be open sourced after the anonymous review.