VLM-Guard: Defending Jailbreaks by Monitoring Only Hundreds of Safety-Critical Neurons

Summary

VLM-Guard is a jailbreak detection framework for Large Vision Language Models that identifies safety-critical neurons linked to harmful semantics through differential analysis of activation values. It isolates a compact set of just a few hundred neurons, less than 0.2% of the total, to build a detector that is lightweight and training-free. The authors report that it detects jailbreak attacks effectively while preserving benign performance in attack-free settings.

Topics

• Prompt injection and jailbreaks

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