When Reasoning Is Not Enough: Proactive Inquiry for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models
arXiv:2610.22068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can act unsafely when individually benign images and texts are interpreted jointly. Beyond implicit reasoning risk, where reasoning drifts toward harm, we identify intent-level risk, where cross-modal ambiguity silently commits the model to a hazardous premise that path-level optimization alone cannot correct. We propose SAFE-PRO, which uses a Risk-Conditioned Uncertainty (RCU) signal, combining predictive…