Han-Wen Liu

The Uncontrolled Variable: Vision-Language Refusal Is Conditioned on the Image-Attachment Interface, and Not Robust to Irrelevant Image Properties

We show that aligned vision-language models also condition refusal on a property of a request's form: whether an image is attached, holding everything the request asks fixed. Attaching a blank canvas, an image that cannot be read, cannot relate to the request, and is byte-identical across every prompt in its condition,...