Multimodal Safety Evaluation Should Measure Controllability Beyond Classification

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.06452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: VLM safety is commonly evaluated through input- and output-level classification. Such classification is necessary, but it does not reveal whether a safety state is accessible or controllable inside the model. We argue that multimodal safety evaluation should therefore report a \emph{controllability profile} alongside behavioral classification, separating representation-level detectability, cross-modal specificity, intervention sensitivity, and beni