Relationship-Aware Safety Unlearning for Multimodal LLMs
Vishnu Narayanan Anilkumar, Abhijith Sreesylesh Babu, Trieu Hai Vo, Mohankrishna Kolla, Alexander Cuneo · Mar 15, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Provisional trustThis page is a lightweight research summary built from the abstract and metadata while deeper extraction catches up.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.
Evidence quality
Provisional
Derived from abstract and metadata only.
Abstract
Generative multimodal models can exhibit safety failures that are inherently relational: two benign concepts can become unsafe when linked by a specific action or relation (e.g., child-drinking-wine). Existing unlearning and concept-erasure approaches often target isolated concepts or image-text pairs, which can cause collateral damage to benign uses of the same objects and relations. We propose relationship-aware safety unlearning: a framework that explicitly represents unsafe object-relation-object (O-R-O) tuples and applies targeted parameter-efficient edits (LoRA) to suppress unsafe tuples while preserving object marginals and safe neighboring relations. We include CLIP-based experiments and robustness evaluation under paraphrase, contextual, and out-of-distribution image attacks.