Safe responses matter: Output-aware safety guardrail mitigate over-refusal in MLLMs

arXiv:2607.09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility. Model fine-tuning achieves robust safety but compromises general utility. Input-side safety guardrails offer a lightweight alternative, yet they suffer from severe over-refusal, indiscriminately blocking benign queries or those the model could have safely answered through refusal or advisory responses. We identify that th...