The integration of additional modalities increases the susceptibility of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to safety risks, such as jailbreak attacks, compared to their language-only counterparts. While existing research primarily focuses on post-hoc alignment techniques, the underlying safety mechanisms within LVLMs remain largely unexplored. In this work , we investigate whether LVLMs inherently encode safety-relevant signals within their internal activations during inference. Our findings reveal that LVLMs exhibit distinct activation patterns when processing unsafe prompts, which can be leveraged to detect and mitigate adversarial inputs without requiring extensive fine-tuning. Building on this insight, we introduce HiddenDetect, a novel tuning-free framework that harnesses internal model activations to enhance safety. Experimental results show that HiddenDetect surpasses state-of-the-art methods in detecting jailbreak attacks against LVLMs. By utilizing intrinsic safety-aware patterns, our method provides an efficient and scalable solution for strengthening LVLM robustness against multimodal threats. Our code and data will be released publicly.

A single language model, even when aligned with labelers through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), may not suit all human preferences. Recent approaches therefore prefer customization, gathering multi-dimensional feedback, and creating distinct reward models for each dimension.Different language models are then optimized for various preferences using multi-objective RLHF (MORLHF) with varying reward weights.However, RL fine-tuning is unstable and resource-heavy, especially with diverse and usually conflicting objectives.In this paper, we present Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO), an RL-free extension of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for multiple alignment objectives.Essentially, MODPO folds language modeling directly into reward modeling, training language models as implicit collective reward models that combine all objectives with specific weights. MODPO theoretically yields the same optimal solutions as MORLHF but is practically more stable and efficient.Empirical results in safety alignment and long-form question answering show that MODPO matches or outperforms existing methods, producing a Pareto front of language models catering to diverse preferences with three times less computational resources compared to MORLHF.Code is available at https://github.com/ZHZisZZ/modpo.