When Reasoning Is Not Enough: Proactive Inquiry for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models

Wei Cai; Jian Zhao; Yuchen Yuan; Xuelong Li

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arXiv · 2610.22068

When Reasoning Is Not Enough: Proactive Inquiry for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models

Wei Cai·Jian Zhao·Yuchen Yuan·Xuelong Li

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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 entropy with a learned cross-modal risk score, to decide when to ask safety-grounded clarifying questions and where to apply path optimization, under a reward that prioritizes safety and penalizes over-refusal. We also build SSUI-Dialog, a multimodal multi-turn dataset with dual-intent supervision, and theoretically analyze gradient variance and unsafe-completion risk under RCU. Across seven benchmarks and two base MLLMs, SAFE-PRO consistently improves safety over SRPO, roughly halves its over-refusal, and surpasses GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet in average single-turn safety.

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Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Xuelong Li. 2026-10-15. When Reasoning Is Not Enough: Proactive Inquiry for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22068

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