While recent studies show the effectiveness of in-context learning (ICL) for tabular data prediction, they also reveal significant fairness issues in large language models (LLMs). Prior work to mitigate fairness issues often employs interventions relying on subjective demonstration selection. Its effectiveness varies significantly with the specific demonstration content, leading to low controllability. Moreover, the improvement of fairness is highly unstable across different models and tasks. To address the challenges of low controllability and limited stability in fairness interventions, we propose Fairness-Aware Context-Contrastive Decoding (Fair-CCD). Fair-CCD first constructs Structural Bias Templates (SBTs), motivated by behavioral patterns observed in demonstrations, to encode the relationship between sensitive attributes and predicted labels in a structured and controllable form. During inference, Fair-CCD injects multiple SBTs and contrasts the model’s responses, generating two differential signals that guide fairness adjustment and preserve task performance. By leveraging attention signals to scale decoding adjustments guided by the difference signals, Fair-CCD achieves stable and adaptive bias mitigation across models and tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Fair-CCD consistently improves fairness metrics without degrading task accuracy.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities by integrating visual and textual information. However, the incorporation of visual modalities also introduces new and complex safety risks, rendering even the most advanced models vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. This paper first analyzes the impact of inserting safety reasoning prompt on various aspects of the model. We find that this external method can help the model resist jailbreak attacks to some extent, but the model still fails to distinguish specific semantic scenarios, resulting in a significantly increased refusal rate for benign queries. Inspired by this, we propose a novel training framework, SURE (Safety Understanding and Reasoning Enhancement for Multimodal Large Language Models), designed to help models internalize chain-of-thought-based safety decision-making capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SURE significantly improves model safety while effectively avoiding over-defense, achieving a good balance between safety and generality. Finally, we create a large-scale multimodal safety reasoning dataset, MLLM-SCoT-Plus, to facilitate research on safety alignment in multimodal models.Our code and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/hfutml/SURE.